I want to multicast my desktop audio stream on my household LAN, so I can play it simultaneously on small computers around the house.
I found instructions on the VideoLanClient site, for transcoding an "input stream" and serving it on the LAN. The same page has a VLC command line for the small computers to receive and play the stream.
https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentat...Line_Examples/

I'm stuck. How do I tell VLC to use the KDE (or whatever) desktop audio mix for its "input stream"?
The GUI VLC has an "open media" dialog with a capture mode selector. One of the options is "Desktop" but how do I say that on the vlc command line? And how do I tell it audio only. We don't need the video.


I'm a complete newbie to audio streaming and multimedia. Fairly comfortable with KDE and Linux basics.

I think it starts by selecting streaming then use a capture device. From there you may just try it and see. Otherwise next question would be how to get the capture device to work.

Not sure VLC would be best choice. https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...hrough-network

I think it may be VLC -- Media -- stream -- select the files to stream then -- stream -- then the destination -(the mode is now set and done). Remote devices can then select what was configured to be streamed.

If you only want the audio on a video then either the end point can limit that or you could use ffmpeg to extract the audio to a separate file and stream only the audio.

How to do all that from the cli would seem to need a bit deeper digging, but probably possible. (using ffmpeg is normally cli).

Interesting enough I found that if you select the icecast destination that you can easily select the audio only, and it even shows the command line for that..