[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio apps (Audacious) over SSH

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and John Lane at 10/04/09 13:08 did gyre and gimble:
> I HAVE IT WORKING NOW!!!! I tracked the problem down to the fact that 
> the xprop "PULSE_SERVER" references the server by host name (jl-vaio and 
> jl-vaio.lan in the above output). These host names were unknown to the 
> client - I fixed it by putting them into /etc/hosts.

Ahh OK. You probably want to look into setting up your DHCP server to 
automatically get your host names right or perhaps using the avahi mdns 
resolver to make zeroconf networks "just work". It's increasingly common 
to make use of these kind of things (Apple is really pushing it) and 
many linux distros now ship with support for this out of the box.

> Without the PULSE_SERVER info, I presume apps like audacious (or vlc 
> which I've also tried) successfully find a pulseaudio server on the 
> network (and this does not depend on host names) ?

No, it basically just goes through a routine that looks for a pulseaudio 
instance on the local machine only. By default, if it doesn't find a 
pulseaudio instance on the local machine, it will automatically start 
one (autospawning). Oh and for reference it's not technically the "apps" 
per-se that do this but the pulse client library which is used by the apps.

> Can I make the SSH 
> one do it the same way ? By this I think I mean how can I make it ignore 
> the values returned by xprop ? I would rather not have to rely on host 
> names.

Not really. The whole thing should just work if you have a zeroconf 
setup correctly in your network. The DNS resolution just works with 
nss_mdns.

> Incidentally, I don't have /etc/xdg/autostart at all and I don't have a 
> pulseaudio daemon on the machine that I'm running Audacious on but this 
> does not stop it working in the X session. It is definitely playing via 
> the Pulseaudio server as I can see the session on the manager.

Indeed. Just like you don't need an X server running on the machine 
running the X application, you don't need a pulseaudio server running on 
the machine producing the audio. Provided there is an X server and pulse 
server running at the point of use, then you can see and hear your apps 
fine :)

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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