| Keith via plug on 25 Nov 2020 10:18:29 -0800 |
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| Re: [PLUG] Low-Latency Audio |
On 11/25/20 8:40 AM, Rich Freeman via plug wrote:
On Wed, Nov 25, 2020 at 6:46 AM Casey Bralla via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:When I move into an apartment, I won't be able to run this cable, but still want to have the same level of service. I could encode the music and distribute it via wireless networking with a raspberry pi at each end, but I suspect the audio would be crappy from the Pi, and the coding/decoding latency means that music played in 1 room would be out of sync with music from another.I've personally been using Google Home and audio casting for this purpose. It isn't perfect, but it works fairly well, and the audio is synced. The speakers obviously aren't high-end. The main issue I've had is that when casting to a group sometimes not every device in the group gets included so you have dead zones. There are probably linux-based solutions that do things right, and I'm very interested in what you find. One thing I've found is that a lot of FOSS software gets audio wrong, unless it is designed specifically for serious audio work. A lot of general contributors are college students who listen to audio/video/etc on their laptops. So, support for 5.1 isn't always universal. During the early years of Android community versions of the OS often broke bluetooth stereo in various ways, again because at that time the stuff that supported it tended to be more expensive or less common. Something that does network multicast with some kind of timecode for syncing would seem to be the ideal solution here, but that is also something that isn't so common.
Similar to Rich, I've recently been using my Chromecast Ultra's for this task since they can do an audio group but there are many times- actually most times I will loose one speaker in the group (I think this is because my net is bridged wirelessly and multicast stuff seems to be temperamental about that). Since it is sometimesy, most of the time, I play music just to my closest device.
I've also done the wrap your own multi-casting thing and if I recall correctly that seemed to work pretty well with mplayer as a client using socat. Can't say I would attempt this over bluetooth. I suppose it could work but the distances over bluetooth for good fidelity are likely to be very short. Even across a small room I've seen bt stuff struggle so I have hard time seeing even a small multi-room deployment working.
That real issue however is your output. Most of my tv's are connected to 2.1 theater systems (via optical S/PDIF) so they sound good. If you're going to use small embedded devices as receivers I would only recommend those that have optical S/PDIF ports. You're more likely to find that before device with RCA connectors but at this point I would not go that way sign digital at the DVD spec is going to sound as good and be more capable (i.e. more channels) and use less power. This will produce the cleanest signal over a single wire that should work with a wide variety of speaker systems.
-- ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Keith C. Perry, MS E.E. Managing Member, DAO Technologies LLC (O) +1.215.525.4165 x2033 (M) +1.215.432.5167 www.daotechnologies.com ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug