Offer: Sound investigation for VNC

[Adam Tauno Williams]

>>  a) Pointers to where someone else has already solved this! :-)
>In my experience, the Xvnc server already traps the most basic of sound
>requests - the system beep - and transmits that to the client.  For
>example, when I get new mail and have Xbiff running on the X server, my Mac
>"quacks" in sympathy.  Obviously, if you want something more sophisticated,
>we need to specify _how_ sophisticated.

There is already several solutions to the network-audio solution.  One is used
by Linux/Gnome: esound.  I have several thin X clients that run off a central
server,  each client is capable of audio and esound streams audio from the apps
(a MP3 player for example, or window manager beeps and grunts) to the client. 
The client runs a small daemon called "esd", and on the server side the
enviroment variable ESPEAKER is set to {client}:{port}.  Linux versions of real
player and many other apps support esound out of the box,  for other's there is
a wrapper program that hi-jacks attempts to open the sound card and routes the
writes to the remote esound daemon.

>Continuous, "CD quality" sound would be much more of a problem, mostly due
>to limited bandwidth.  To reduce bandwidth consumption, various compression

On a 100Mbps shared segment audio works quite well, with only an occasional clip
(at least with esound which does NO compression).


Systems and Network Administrator
Morrison Industries
1825 Monroe Ave NW.
Grand Rapids, MI. 49505
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