[pulseaudio-discuss] Network audio stuttering?

[Russell Treleaven]

Could you please open a bug for this?

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018, 12:03 PM Alexander E. Patrakov <patrakov at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Russell Treleaven <rtreleaven at bunnykick.ca>:
> >
> > Is there an open bug for this?
>
> No.
>
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 6:41 PM Alexander E. Patrakov <patrakov at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> David Davidović <david at davidovic.io>:
> >> >
> >> > Hi,
> >> >
> >> > I'm running a system-wide PulseAudio instance on a headless box
> connected to my speaker system. The sink is broadcast via Zeroconf and I
> use it to play music and movies via WiFi from my laptop. The headless box
> is connected to the WiFi router via a wired connection.
> >> >
> >> > Unfortunately, every couple of minutes or so, the sound stutters for
> a short time, then returns to normal.
> >> >
> >> > Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to debug the source of
> these issues? My best bet is WiFi latency. I tried increasing the buffer
> size (via default-fragments and default-fragment-size-msec) on both the
> client and server machine but I haven't seen any considerable improvement.
> The actual network packets seem to always be around 1.5K in size, which
> would be around 4ms of uncompressed sound with 32-bit stereo samples at
> 44.1kHz, and that's without any overhead. If my calculation is true, this
> would explain the stuttering, as the network latency towards the machine is
> at a baseline of ~2ms but can spike sometimes due to nature of WiFi.
> >> >
> >>
> >> Packets are sent in advance, and WiFi cannot allow for bigger packets
> anyway.
> >>
> >> > I'd be happy if there was a way to e.g. tell the native-protocol-tcp
> module to buffer more of the audio and play it, as I don't mind the
> increased latency; I just want to get rid of the stuttering and all
> applications I use manage PulseAudio latency compensation quite well.
> >>
> >> You can't. It's the media player application who requests buffering
> >> and specifies the latency. However, if pavucontrol is running, the
> >> latency is capped to something like 20 ms, due to the misguided design
> >> decision that monitor sinks should monitor what is written right now
> >> (not what is playing right now).
> >>
> >> What would help is a "pactl list sinks" on both ends while music is
> >> playing and pavucontrol is not running.
> >>
> >> > Has anyone else had this issue and resolved it?
> >>
> >> Yes, by closing pavucontrol.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Alexander E. Patrakov
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> pulseaudio-discuss mailing list
> >> pulseaudio-discuss at lists.freedesktop.org
> >> https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > pulseaudio-discuss at lists.freedesktop.org
> > https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss
>
>
>
> --
> Alexander E. Patrakov
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>
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