[pulseaudio-discuss] GSoC: Call for project ideas

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 23.03.2013 12:11, schrieb Toby Smithe:
> Hi,
>
> I have a fairly free summer coming up, and thought it would be nice to
> participate in GSoC. For a while I've been interested in PulseAudio, and
> I have an idea for a project. I wonder if you might say whether you
> think it plausible.
>
> I use PulseAudio's native protocol streaming quite a lot, and I've
> noticed that it seems quite rudimentary. I read the code a couple of
> releases back, and it seems just to stream uncompressed PCM over
> TCP. With a wireless connection and multi-channel audio, this quickly
> becomes impractical, with drops and latency problems. A while ago, I
> looked into implementing Opus compression for the network streams, but
> never had a chance. I think Opus would make the ideal codec because it
> is very flexible, recently ratified as an Internet standard, and can be
> remarkably lightweight (according to the official benchmarks).
>
> In doing these network audio, I might also be able to move on to
> auxiliary tasks like improving the GUI tools for this use-case.
>
> Do you think this might work?


I think this is a great project idea. I've been suffering from the 
problems you mentioned as well. However I think a lossless codec should 
be considered. Lossy codecs might not be acceptable for lots of people 
and a lossless codec might improve things sufficiently. But I can see a 
lossy codec being useful also for congested networks, so it could be an 
option.

Best regards.