[pulseaudio-discuss] Is it possible to connect to an existing stream using pulse audio?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

On Thu, 7 Nov 2013 11:48:19 +0530, sathishkumar sivagurunathan
<sathish1000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> My aim is as follows.
> 
> 1)  I have a audio player like Vlc running. I have checked with PAMAN
> command that VLC as a client and a stream with stream name is created.
> 
> My intention is to connect to this pretty existing stream.

You cannot "connect" to an existing stream. A stream is connected by its
client to the server and that is all as far as connecting is  concerned. To
manipulate another client's stream, you need to use the introspection
functions related to sink inputs. Basically, that is what the
PulseAudio-based mixer applications do: you can move a sink input to
another sink, change the volume, mute state and balance of the sink input
or kill the sink input.

I think it should be pretty obvious, but there are no ways for PulseAudio
to pause a stream. The playback state machine of VLC or Totem is in VLC and
Totem, not in PulseAudio. All PulseAudio can do is advise the application
that its stream is preempted and thus the application _should_ pause.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
Sent from my collocated server