[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Markus Rechberger at 22/12/09 16:54 did gyre and gimble:
> A couple of years ago I used to log in on a remote PC and export XMMS
> to another PC for playing back audio, I can imagine that this is also
> not possible anymore with PA

The problem is you are expecting one thing whereas most people expect
something else.

If I login to a remote PC and export XMMS to another PC, I *expect* my
audio to be played at the same location as the display is seen. This
works perfectly with PA if you enable the TCP options in paprefs.

1. ssh machineb
2. (internally ssh will forward X11 via a tunnel and set $DISPLAY
environment variable in your session on machineb - ssh is aware of X)
3. xmms
4. (as an x app, xmms will look at $DISPLAY, which will ultimately be
tunneled over ssh to your local machine).
5. xmms -> play
6. PA client kicks in, looks for properties in the X root window (which
belong to our initial machine), finds details of how to connect to our
local machine (as we can't use an SSH tunnel as ssh is not aware of PA
yet in the same way it is with X), connects and plays sound.

This way I can sit at my laptop, ssh to my server in the next room, run
a visual app that plays audio and both see and hear the app on my local
machine. This is how most people expect remote applications to work.

As an SSH users connecting to a remote machine, I'd have no right to
access the remote machine's audio hardware.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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