PulseAudio streaming via RTP

[bssteph]

Has anyone gotten streaming streaming audio via RTP and PulseAudio over a LAN to work? I've been banging my head against it most of the day without success. What I'm seeing is that whenever I start PulseAudio on the server, the LAN dies (can't ping anything internal or external) for a couple seconds and then recovers, but the moment I start having MPD play to the sink, the LAN dies until I kill pulseaudio, and that's without anything listening. When I do have something listening, the audio is choppy (1 sec of playback, 1 sec of silence) while the rest of the LAN is apparently suffocated.

I found a really simple Python script that does a basic multicast test, so while the payload is nowhere comparable, multicast traffic does seem to be okay on the LAN. And it shouldn't be a throughput thing --- my old setup was having MPD use the "pulse" plugin to stream its music directly from the server box to my desktop. It's a wired connection and that has always worked perfectly.

So really I'm looking for someone who has gotten PulseAudio RTP to work and can send some config files my way. Given that the LAN dies for a couple seconds right when I start PulseAudio (before starting any playback), I'm guessing it's either a PulseAudio problem or something misconfigured with multicast (I couldn't find a good way to test its reliability, so I'm mostly winging that). Any guesses appreciated.

I used http://www.hackerposse.com/~rozzin/journal//whole-home-pulseaudio.html as my guide and tried its caveat section regarding tsched.