[mythtv-users] Standalone music player with mythfrontend on Raspberry PI?

[stuart]

On 01/07/2013 08:49 AM, George Galt wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 6:09 AM, David Whyte <david.whyte at gmail.com
> <mailto:david.whyte at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 6:07 AM, Nick Rout <nick.rout at gmail.com
>     <mailto:nick.rout at gmail.com>> wrote:
>      >
>      >
>      >>
>      >
>      > How well does that sync with your other squeezeboxes?
>      >
>      >>
>
>
>     I have been looking into this setup myself for my Pi.  I have no
>     hardware squeezeboxes.  I used squeezeslave for a while but when I
>     downloaded SqueezePlayer for my phone and tablet from the Google play
>     store I found that SqueezePlay and squeezeslave would not play well.
>     I never found the sync to be great between two squeezeslave machines
>     either (often one would get up to 30 seconds or more behind the
>     other).
>
>     I then found squeezelite.  Again, I don't have hardware players, but
>     between multiple instances of itself and between it and SqueezePlayer
>     on the android devices, it has all gone well.
>
>     I plan to use my Pi as a squeezelite player, hooked up to some kind of
>     stand-alone amp for playing audio on outdoor speakers.  Whether I
>     actually get that little project of the drawing board is another story
>     though :P
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>
>
> Well this has gone WAY off the mythtv topic, but thanks for the pointer
> to squeezelite.  I was not aware of it.  FYI, the problem with sync is
> often buffer sizes.  In general, the smaller and cheaper your hardware
> (with smaller buffers) the better sync will work.
>

Sorry for coming in late on this.  I had fiddled with syncing an IBM 
chip with a real slimdevices (yeah, old stuff) box.  It's not easy and 
there is a lot of guess work.  The problem is (well was) that the Squeez 
server would control a software buffer on the client.  Ok, kind of like 
controlling a car on ice, I thought.  But that's not the real problem. 
Next the data would get dumped into the proprietary software / hardware. 
  The effect was that while people were "ok" with how it synced, I could 
never prevent clipping off the the first several seconds of a new play 
list.  That is to say, I never really got control of that second buffer 
(hardware or software).

So, my 2 cents, syncing sound over Ethernet is a pain.  And the human 
ear is really good at detecting differences (i.e. what direction sound 
comes from or how big a room is even in the dark). I would consider 
getting a nice stereo that can permeate the house with good sound and 
set up a IR repeater so you can control it from where ever.

---

So as far as mythtv, are people using the squeezcenter plug in or is 
there something else I should be looking into w.r.t. playing music on a 
mythtv front end?

Also, for those of us w/o a HDMI stereo for audio "picking off", are 
there any hints / suggestions as to how to get good sound out of the 
computer?  I was thinking of adding a TOSLINK/SPIDIF port but shutter to 
think if that will compromise the primary sound path over the HDMI cable 
to the TV (we're talking about a plummeting WAF index here guys).

-thanks