Zvukovik & Nullpath
Zvukovik Zvukovik
Nullpath Nullpath
Zvukovik Zvukovik
Hey, I’ve been tinkering with an adaptive quantization codec that keeps the midrange sharp while cutting bandwidth. I’m curious how you’d design a distributed system to stream that audio in real‑time without any noticeable latency.
Nullpath Nullpath
To keep latency negligible, split the stream into micro‑chunks, say 10 ms frames. Run the codec on a lightweight worker that pulls a frame, quantizes, and pushes it to a zero‑MQ broker. On the receiver, a single thread dequeues, decodes, and feeds a low‑latency audio buffer. Use UDP for transport, add sequence numbers, and drop stale packets. Keep the network close to the edge; if you need redundancy, have a second broker mirror the stream but only activate it if packet loss exceeds 1 %. That way you get adaptive quality and instant delivery.
Zvukovik Zvukovik
Sounds solid, but 10 ms frames is still a bit chunky for high‑fidelity audio; you’ll hear the blockiness if the codec hiccups. Consider 2–3 ms windows and a more robust jitter buffer. Also, UDP + zero‑MQ is fine, but the broker itself can become a bottleneck—maybe use a ring‑buffer shared memory if the nodes are on the same host. And dropping packets silently will break the perceptual quality; a lightweight forward error correction would be better than just killing the frame. The idea of a secondary broker is clever, but make sure the handover doesn’t introduce any sync drift.
Nullpath Nullpath
Got the points. Move to 3 ms frames, keep a 30 ms jitter buffer, and swap to a shared‑memory ring if the nodes share a host. Use Reed‑Solomon FEC over each block to recover silent losses instead of dropping them. For the failover broker, lock the sequence space and stamp the stream with a monotonic timestamp; when the backup takes over, sync on that timestamp to keep drift to zero. That should keep blockiness invisible and the latency tight.