I’ve first been trying to use the feature of pulse to also directly receive the rtp stream: load-module module-rtp-recv. However that resulted in annoying tune and speed changes. Looks like cvlc is more mature here, in that being able to synchronize the stream playback better.

And I’ve actually removed the whole #transcode from cvlc. Works fine here, usually drains about 1.44MBit/s which is no sweat for the gbit-lan here at all.

And to make it even more complicated, I’m using a multicast address, so anyone else who would like to drop in and listen too or play it back over their own speakers can do so. And I’m doing some multicast routing as well (using smcroute in linux), the pc streaming the music is on a different ip subnet than the pc playing the music. Getting the multicast bit was a pain in the a** to get working, but it worked in the end. So I suggest anyone to start with the normal, unicast address stuff first, like you did.