Re: Forwarding audio/music or generic devices?

Christian Hammers <ch@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Any idea how to tunnel /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer through an SSH tunnel?

Since it's easy to tunnel TCP connections, one obvious approach is
to convert output to /dev/dsp into output via a TCP connection, and
tunnel that instead.

With that in mind, if I wanted to do something like this, I'd
probably start by looking into network-based audio servers: aRts,
ESD, NAS, that sort of thing. If you could get your mp3 manager to
output to what it thinks is an audio server, but which is actually
an SSH port-forwarding to an audio server run on your work machine,
that might be the easiest way.

Failing that, you might kludge around the same concept by
LD_PRELOADing a library into your mp3 manager which intercepted
attempts to open /dev/dsp and converted them into network
connections to a forwarded port, but I'd guess that probably
wouldn't work so well, not to mention that it would take a lot more
work even to try it.

It would be cool if I could run my favourite mp3 manager on my home
desktop but listen on my work desktop.

Other things to bear in mind if you try this:

- streaming of MP3 media into your company network might violate
company IP policy (I think it would if I did it at _my_ company,
at least)

- streaming MP3 data over a TCP connection might turn out not to
work well in real-time, leading to pauses and glitches in the
sound.

--
Simon Tatham "A cynic is a person who smells flowers and
<anakin@xxxxxxxxx> immediately looks around for a coffin."
.