Vorbis dev - Jan 2010 - Ogg/Vorbis fenced out of Apple's airport airtunes

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256


re all,

a quick  message to ask  if anyone had  the same experience  trying to
play Ogg/Vorbis encoded music via wireless airport connection (the new
system Apple uses to playback on their speakers via wifi).

i use pulse-audio to interact with A's proprietary system: works quite
well, but still has some buffering glitches, so its more convenient to
copy music to my apple's friends to playback from their computer.

today we  copied some Ogg files  using a usb stick,  then we installed
the  XiphQT  component  0.1.9  from xiph.org/quicktime  and  restarted
ITunes..

now the  strange bit: the  music plays fine  from Itunes on  the local
laptop speakers, but never wants to play on the airport wifi connected
speakers! anyone  has any hints on why  this happens? 

i can usually  play ogg files on this setup  using pulse-audio and i'm
sure  the airsound  protocol  doesn't requests  that  input files  are
encoded in  a certain way as  decoding and output  tasks are logically
separate,  all  doe  this  is  a  conjecture  and  i  didn't  analysed
pulse-audio code.

is  there  something  missing  in  the  XiphQT  component,  or  is  an
artificial  limitation  of  Itunes  against  free  and/or  third-party
codecs?

thanks for your insights,
ciao

- -- 
jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.org

GPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F  5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
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=orkz
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 13:22 +0100, jaromil wrote:
> now the  strange bit: the  music plays fine  from Itunes on  the local
> laptop speakers, but never wants to play on the airport wifi connected
> speakers! anyone  has any hints on why  this happens? 
I don't have anything that uses Airport or have any technical
information on it.  I wonder though if Apple have done something similar
to the Logitech (previously SlimDevices) Squeezebox.

The Squeezebox system consists of one or more hardware players which
have no integral storage and a server running on a PC or NAS where the
music is stored.  There is hardware or firmware decoding in the player
for a limited set of audio codecs and there are many other formats where
the server can transparently transcode from the format of the file
concerned into one of the ones the player can decode.

Is that what is happening here?  Is the Apple setup trying to feed the
Vorbis file to the Airport connected speakers[1] whereas when running
under pulse the vorbis decoder is running on the PC/Mac and uncompressed
audio is being sent to the speakers?

[1] - if this is the case the speakers are obviously rather more than
that - they have to be a digital media player but without any media,
similar to the Squeezebox players but presumably without any UI either.

Steve.