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Streaming Music to the Chumby with PulseAudio and GStreamer

I spent a little while today figuring out how to stream the music I was playing in Rhythmbox (in the living room) to my Chumby (in the kitchen) . I found a nice article that explains how to set up a GStreamer pipeline for streaming the monitor output from PulseAudio through Icecast. It works quite well for streaming to the Chumby (except for a pretty significant lag). Here's the quick start guide for Ubuntu Intrepid:
  • Set up PulseAudio.
  • $ sudo apt-get install icecast2
  • Edit /etc/default/icecast2 to enable Icecast and /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml to set a password (defaults to "hackme").
  • $ sudo /etc/init.d/icecast2 start
  • Find the name of your PulseAudio monitor device by opening the manager from the PulseAudio applet. It should start with alsa_output.pci and end with monitor.
  • $ gst-launch pulsesrc device=<alsa_output.pci...monitor> ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux ! shout2send mount=/stream.ogg port=8000 password=hackme ip=127.0.0.1
  • Start sshd on your Chumby.
  • $ ssh root@<chumby_ip> btplay --output=alsa:plug:dmixer http://<server_ip>:8000/stream.ogg
I'm working on a Rhythmbox plugin for this. Stay tuned :)

Update
Plugin written.

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