Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jerf 4320 days ago
Ah, I smell the sort of thing where the only answer you'll accept, and the only answer I can give is, "Go ahead and try it."

You'll find out why it's hard in a way that no amount of explaining will do, and you'll find reality less amenable to argumentation than comment boxes.

(If you do try it, make sure you've got two different devices, ideally two different types, and be sure to be streaming from somewhere at least 50ms away on the network, ideally with at least a few ms in variance between requests. Though odds are pretty good that even trying to stream the same song to two identical devices over a local Wifi network would only work most of the time, you'd find...)

2 comments

Hmmm based upon a suggestion above I looked at SpeakerBlast and it looks like they got audio playback synced up on a tablet, laptop, phone, etc....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAnEFOr1lP4

hmmm, so i guess it can be done!??!

Yes, of course it can be done.

It just isn't as easy as it looks.

In fact, things that are a great deal more complicated can also be done, such as really fantastic real-time echo cancellation or feedback prevention in a large room with many speakers and many microphones. It just isn't as easy as you would naively think; everything that just leaps to mind (especially if you aren't particularly knowledgeable about signal processing) don't work. You'll pay big bucks for the system that can do that, and there's a reason for that.

Well, Spotify caches songs, so the streaming part is done for you. The problem is constrained to synchronizing playback. Yes, that might be really hard, but you're inventing problems.
Try it.

You'll discover I'm not inventing problems, I'm oversimplifying.

Try it.

What about connecting over an local area network? I know the game Spaceteam did this quite well. I wonder how they managed this technological feat.