[Vorbis-dev] Ogg/Vorbis fenced out of Apple's airport airtunes

[Steve Fosdick]

On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 13:22 +0100, jaromil wrote:

> now the  strange bit: the  music plays fine  from Itunes on  the local
> laptop speakers, but never wants to play on the airport wifi connected
> speakers! anyone  has any hints on why  this happens? 

I don't have anything that uses Airport or have any technical
information on it.  I wonder though if Apple have done something similar
to the Logitech (previously SlimDevices) Squeezebox.

The Squeezebox system consists of one or more hardware players which
have no integral storage and a server running on a PC or NAS where the
music is stored.  There is hardware or firmware decoding in the player
for a limited set of audio codecs and there are many other formats where
the server can transparently transcode from the format of the file
concerned into one of the ones the player can decode.

Is that what is happening here?  Is the Apple setup trying to feed the
Vorbis file to the Airport connected speakers[1] whereas when running
under pulse the vorbis decoder is running on the PC/Mac and uncompressed
audio is being sent to the speakers?

[1] - if this is the case the speakers are obviously rather more than
that - they have to be a digital media player but without any media,
similar to the Squeezebox players but presumably without any UI either.

Steve.