[pulseaudio-discuss] Is it possible to compress pulseaudio's network streams?

[Maarten Bosmans]

There are currently no plans and no active development on compressed
network streams for PulseAudio. That said, it would be nice to have
some day. It seems that the consensus is that the CELT codec would be
best suited for this, because of it's tight control over latency.

When streaming audio (especially over wifi) latency and jitter are
much more of a concern than bandwidth. There is certainly some room
for improvement there, even without adding a crompressed stream
format.

Maarten


2011/5/10 Aitor Pazos <mail at aitorpazos.es>:
> Dear list,
> I've been using Pulseaudio over the network for a while. When my laptop is
> docked it works pretty well through the wired connection, but when I go
> wireless sound gets choppy. This situation makes the whole network
> functionality almost non-sense for me as I could attach my usb sound card
> directly to my dock station (with 5.1 speakers). Checking the traffic I get an
> around 4mb/s sustained flow which I guess is too high for my unreliable
> wireless network.
> I've googled quite a lot and I haven't found any real effective solution to
> this issue. I guess the better solution would be to compress these streams in
> order to reduce bandwidth requirements. Is it possible to do this in
> pulseaudio. Are there any plans of implementing some solution for this
> situation? Which are the most important parameters I should try to tune apart
> from "default-fragments" and "default-fragment-size-msec"?
>
> Thank you very much,
>    Aitor Pazos