Streaming raw audio across a network
Folks,
I have a minor questio: Just lately I have acquired a nice laptop (IBM
Thinkpad 600x) that really runs great on Linux. Now as an experiment I
started XMMS on my desktop machine over SSH, and set the ESD output plugin
to output to a remote system. After setting esd on my laptop to accept
public IP connections I thought I could just stream my MP3's and Oggs over
the Net.
Unfortunately I get choppy sound. About every 10 seconds a bit of the song
is dropped. Checking my network settings, I found my NIC was dropping
packets due to a buffer overrun. Now, assuming my desktop outputs the
sound at CD quality, that would be 44.1k times 16 bits = some 700kbit/s.
Given that I am running a 100Mbit/s link, and both PC's are powerful
enough to encode/decode the SSH connection in real time, how is this
possible? Both PC's run a PIII at 500Mhz, the desktop with 256M and a
rtl8139 NIC, the laptop 128M and a 3com 574.
Any clues out there, or should I just set up an Icecast server? I'd like
to be able to just put my laptop next to my bed and listen over a pair of
headphones.
Mart
Reply to: