[NTLUG:Discuss] LAN sound

[Chris Cox]

On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 05:16 -0700, Fred wrote:
> Occasionally I connect to my main computer with an
> ssh -X session, primarily to read my mail from the living 
> room because I'm too lazy to get off the couch. When I 
> clickon an attached wmv or avi or whatever else those
> dummies send to clog up the net, mplayer launches
> on the main system and plays the content. I get the video 
> over the lan but no audio. Well, if the office door is open, 
> I can barely hear it. How do I get audio over the lan?

Both the esound daemon and pulseaudio have the ability
to go across the network.  However, not all tools are
well setup by default to enable this... certainly not
when doing X11 protocol.

Can it still be done?  Yes and no.  It will NOT be
insync, even with pulseaudio (I don't think anyhow),
just because you're doing a remote X11 client.  The
rest would be redirecting sound somehow from the client
so that it would tie into your local sound daemon (not
sure).

With that said, there are remote desktop protocols
(like FreeNX/nomachine) that do remote sound (uses
esound).  Might take some setup work to do with just
X11 though (??).

Options:  use the local system for the player and
get to remote files using a remote file system protocol
(e.g. NFS, Samba/SMB).