[pulseaudio-discuss] pax11publish -e -S

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Matt Zagrabelny at 24/10/10 11:58 did gyre and gimble:
> On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 2:01 AM, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> 
>> For what it's worth, when you first log into X11, PA loads the modules
>> module-x11-publish (via start-pulseaudio-x11), which should export the
>> properties you need and not require pax11publish to be run manually.
> 
> I didn't mention that 'zombie' is a headless system and PA is running
> in system mode.

Oh right. I didn't fully read the previous email... turns out you're
kinda approaching the problem in the wrong way... I'll explain below.

>> Make sure you are not using padevchooser as it's messes about with the
>> x11 properties and the default setup should be sufficient for your needs.
> 
> Sure. I've stayed away from padevchooser after seeing recommendations
> to not use it on the list. Its interface is still pretty nice, though.
> 
> Just out of curiosity, is it possible to send one application to
> another SINK/SERVER or do you need to send all of your local audio
> traffic to it?


Yes. You can do this one of two ways. The first way is a bit brutal: do
something like:
 export PULSE_SERVER=zombie; my-sound-producing-application

this will tell your app to talk _directly_ to the zombie's PA server.

And here is where things get interesting. You probably don't _want_ to
get your localhost to talk directly to zombie, but rather go through a
"tunnel" sink. Tunnels appear in your local PA and are the same as any
other real output device except, as the name suggests, they are just
tunnels over the network to the h/w on a remote machine.

You can load a tunnel sink via:

pacmd load-module module-tunnel-sink sever=zombie sink_name="tunnel"

That way you don't mess around with pax11publish, or padevchooser or
client.conf at all, you just play to your local PA and when you want an
application to output to zombie, just fire up pavucontrol and find the
application in question under the "Playback" tab and move it to the
remove device.

You don't even really need to load the module-tunnel-sink manually as
you can let avahi do this for you automatically. Just ensure you have
module-zeroconf-publish running in your system-wide PA on zombie and
then load up paprefs on your localhost and tick the box that says "Make
discovered devices on the network available locally" or something
similar. This setting in paprefs will load module-zeroconf-discover in
your localhost PA and thus load module-tunnel-sink for you automatically
when it finds one. This needs a working avahi setup obviously, but you
can debug that with avahi-browse -ta on your local machine.

Hope this explains things.

FWIW, the buffering when using tunnels is not quite as nice as direct
connections but in wired LANs it's generally not a problem... perhaps
sometime soon someone will fix up module-tunnel-sink to be a bit more
dynamic with it's buffering metrics!

Col



-- 

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

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