Would be really cool to get support for esound daemon as output backend.

Possible via http://www.phrozensmoke.com/projects/pyvoicechat/index_esd.php http://www.enduden.com/~mmuller/projects/pyesd/index.html

Background: Had an remote ESD and it would be really nice to have support direct in GW, ideally os independent.

ESD is better than mplayer how?

Hmm... didn't try mplayer als streaming client/server... but i belive it didn't work on arm architecture? Or support mplayer steamoutput to ESD Server?

Better case smaller... KB vs. MB ...

If mplayer works directly, no additional support is needed cause mplayer is available on windows, mac and linux

Tried some builds for windows and mac... seems no esd support compiled in :'(

So whats the end result we want here? I wasn't 100% certain as to what ESD would do. After 5 minutes of investigation: - sending music to ESD, ESD acts as a server, you can connect to the server and presumably some application will playback the streamed music? - this would allow you to: 1. stream music over a network? 2. output that stream to multiple devices/speakers at the same time? 3. something else?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_Sound_Daemon

Nope... ESD Plays the music. It's working like an remote soundcard. ESD can running on DBOX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbox2) or on other remote mediaplayers...

So i can listen to the music, which GW plays directly on my homecinema

1 & 2 You're absolutely correct. 3. Play locally... but this is still solved by mplayer and the python modules.

PulseAudio:

MPlayer

MPlayer natively supports PulseAudio output with the "-ao pulse" option. It can also be configured to default to PulseAudio output, in ~/.mplayer/config for per-user, or /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf for system-wide: File: /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf ao=pulse

PulseAudio also provides its own native interface to applications that want to support PulseAudio directly, as well as a legacy interface for ESD applications, making it suitable as a drop-in replacement for ESD.

So, Groovewalrus uses mPLayer for Linux and OS/X playback and I had it working for windows too. Add a new enhancement if you want me to resurrect the mPlayer for Windows backend.

Neither PA nor ESD is supported by mplayer in OSX or Windows... same for mpg123. Afaik there is no working PA support for Windows or OSX

PA is the successor of ESD, but eats much resources and isn't stable enough on some platforms.

added Ticket #127 for mpg123 support, cause i think it is the bedder choise for GW. GW is (currently) an audioplayer, so it didn't need a 20 MB backend, which can play a various amount of videofiles...

Didn't know how difficult (or impossible) the implementation of platformindipendent esd support in python is. (but as said, it would be a nice and useful feature)