multi room music playing goodness without paying for it?

Well. I decided that I really needed to be able to play the same music in all my rooms:

  • Installed and configure MPD on my Mythtv box
  • Used Theremin to control this.
  • Setup Icecast to broadcast a ogg stream
  • Setup MPD to broadcast to a Icecast server
  • Used mplayer on the Mythtv box to play the stream and VLC on the Mac.

Except it doesn’t work. I just cannot get less than about 0.5seconds latency, which does not sound much but is enough to make it painful to listen to!

Ok then let’s think of another solution.

I am very impressed with MPD though. It’s a very cool way of playing music from my laptop, direct through my speakers (along with my awesome Rel sub!). Basically it is a remote control client to play music on another computer. MPD plays and publishes all music available on that remote computer, to any connected remote clients. So I can use Theremin to search for and play music through my main system whilst sat on the settee with the laptop! Funky!