Streaming Audio -- which Player on Linux?

[lodp]

I got streaming audio with the Esound daemon to work on my Wl-500g, thanks to the Tutorial on streaming audio in this forum. This by itself is great!

Now I'm looking for a player with esound output, that can play video and audio and stream the audio to the router.
So far, i only found XMMS and with mplayer (on the commandline) to work with streaming audio.

With XMMS, you can use a plugin to display video -- but it's all outdated (you can't get full screen, for example).
For mplayer, i couldn't find a frontend that supports streaming. gmplayer and kmplayer both don't have the option in the preferences. so you resort to the commandline, typing:

mplayer -ao esd:192.168.1.1 -fs <file>

and it sorta works, but you've got no graphical controls.

anybody know a unified solution?

[lodp]

I got it!

Just found out that if you use kmplayer with the actual mplayer engine (which for some reason wasn't available to me before), you can specify additional command line arguments for mplayer in the preferences. so i just entered

-ao esd:192.168.1.1 -delay -0.5

in General Options>MPlayer>Additional command line arguments, and voilá, i can view almost any video with audio streaming to the audio dongle on my router. nice!

the first part specifies the Esound output to the remote host, the -delay part fixes a 0.5 second video delay that i encountered.

[lodp]

i also found out that you can make any application that features an eSound plugin to stream audio to the router, by starting it with a prefix -- here's the example for the amaroK player:

export ESPEAKER=192.168.1.1&&amarok %U

this starts amaroK, now you just have to select eSound output, and you're set with audio from the router...

[elektronaut]

I got mplayer and amarok streaming to my WL-500gx yesterday thanks to your posts. But today they both don't want to play any audio anymore. Amarok tells me about xine not being able to initialize any audio driver, mplayer tells me:

[AO ESD] esd_open_sound failed: Connection refused
Could not open/initialize audio device -> no sound.
Audio: no sound

Which other audio settings do you have on your system? Do you use Gnome, and if so, what did you select in "System > Settings > Audio"?

[elektronaut]

The problem was that esd was not running.

[elektronaut]

Hey, I found an even better way: You can direct all sound output using gstreamer to your router: Type

gstreamer-properties

in the terminal, and choose "user defined" for the output and enter

esdsink host=192.168.1.0

or whatever your router's address is, in the "forwarding" section.