dlna_audiostream

⚠ NOT RELEASED YET - VERY INCOMPLETE & NOT TESTED ⚠

This role makes the system sound available as an audio stream through DLNA.

That means that you will be able to listen to the sound playing on the targeted machine from any DLNA renderer. This is used for instance to listen to the music played by a Raspberry Pi with Kodi on your Hi-Fi DLNA speakers.

Under the hood it :

• installs Rygel and GstLaunch (including PulseAudio and gstreamer, as required dependencies)
• creates a PulseAudio sink that appears as an audio stream on DLNA renderers

By default FLAC and MPEG streams are available ; you may customize / change this by updating the "Configure Rygel" step in tasks/main.yml. FLAC is recommended to reduce audio delay if you have a decent network speed. See https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Rygel/Pulseaudio#gst-launch.

Requirements

It is aimed at Raspberry Pi and not tested on other platforms.

Role Variables

Please look at the self-documented defaults/main.yml to see what variables you need to set.

Dependencies

None.

Example Playbook

- hosts: servers
  roles:
     - role: nicolabs.dlna_audiostream
       vars:
           pulseaudio_users:
            - pi
            - me
           dlna_audiostream_expose_system_audio: no

A note on PulseAudio configuration for DLNA

All sources I've found give the graphic way to configure the DLNA server : by checking two boxes in the paprefs utility.

However this didn't allow for automatic configuration so this role implements it by adding the corresponding lines in /etc/pulse/default.pa. I relied on https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/paprefs/-/tree/master/src to understand how to replicate the paprefs behaviour.

The effect is the same but, as stated in default.pa, please note that changes in this file will not be seen in paprefs and playing with both might generate conflicts (well I guess one will just override the other...).

TODO

• redirect the default system sound to this sink (may be ignored if you just want to plug a given application into the sink)
• start Rygel at boot
• create more / allow customizing audio stream (e.g. a compressed one when the network is not reliable enough)

References

• PulseAudio main documentation
• Rygel - PulseAudio
• Rygel - configuration
• PulseAudio under the hood
• github.com/BaReinhard/Super-Simple-Raspberry-Pi-Audio-Receiver-Install
• StackExchange Raspberry Pi - How to get PulseAudio running?

License

MIT

Author Information

nicolabs.net