Icecast - Jan 2005 - Synchronous playback on multiple clients

Hi icecast community.

Has anybody tried (and found a way) to have synchronous playback on 
multiple clients? We have a couple of rooms and it would be nice to be 
able to have one central server that you can throws files at that should 
be played and then listen to this stream in all rooms. We have machines 
in most of the rooms which would then play the stream. The problem right 
now is that the streams always have an offset of about 1/2 to 1 second. 
This is pretty annoying as you can imagine.. I haved tried xmms as a 
client and played a bit with the buffer but without success. Did 
somebody already do that? If so how? Is it possible with icecast? 
Problem on the client side (if so any client known that can do this)?

Thanks,
	Tim

-- 
     Tim Niemueller <tim@niemueller.de>      www.niemueller.de
================================================================  Imagination is
more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)

Hi:

This question gets asked every few months or so.

The short answer is no.  Icecast's HTTP streaming is not really designed 
for this, it simply goes from start to end as it gets it.

Having said that, it should be possible in theory to use the ogg layer and 
some synchronising code to keep players in step with each other, but I've 
not heard of anyone doing this.  Note that I'm not a developer, I'm just
thinking about the kinds of things the ogg layer offers and I'd think that 
the time offsets available would make this possible.  But all the decoders 
would have to be able to sync to a master decoder so that they could keep 
in step with it.

Of course the real simple answer to this would be to have only one decoder 
and run audio cables or use a transmitter to get the sound to the various 
rooms.

Geoff.


-- 
Geoff Shang <geoff@hitsandpieces.net>
Phone: +61-418-96-5590
MSN: geoff@acbradio.org

Make sure your E-mail can be read by everyone!
http://www.betips.net/etc/evilmail.html

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html