awy wrote: > Hello, > > I'm giving some serious thought about how to improve the multi-player > synchronization problem. In particular, the issue that players can get > out of synchronization with each other. >
Good, there's room for improvement. > To make sure that I am starting in the right place, let me briefly > assert my understanding of how the current synchronization mechanism > works. Players are synchronized at the start of a track by filling each > player's buffer above a low-water mark while in 'buffering' mode (not > playing), and then putting all synchronized players into play mode as > near simultaneously as possible. Synchronization only occurs at the > start of a track, including when the track is a remote stream such as > an Internet radio station. > > So the first question is why do players get out of sync? Some > possibilities: > 1. They start out of sync because the command to start playing is not > received sufficiently simultaneously by all players. > I know I see this fairly regularly. I use my living room and kitchen players synced. When the 'living' player is playing and I switch on the kitchen one, they don't always start synchronized properly, even though the song restarts (annoying enough by itself). Both players are SB3's and they're both connected to the same wireless access point. Since Slimserver uses TCP I'm assuming they don't use broadcast to turn on the players at exactly the same time, but two commands must go out over TCP. This is never exactly at the same time and apparently sometimes the difference is too great for a decent sync. My idea would be to use a UDP broadcast command to trigger playback. If my understanding is correct, all players should receive that at exactly the same time - or not at all if there's a network error ;). Regards, Peter _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
