[linux-audio-dev] Audio over Ethernet?

[Steve Harris]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2004 at 11:19:50 +0200, David Olofson wrote:
> That said, I don't know which is better in terms of hardware and 
> drivers; 1394 or ethernet... AFAIK, both are essentially high speed 
> serial bus interfaces, but it might be that 1394 doesn't have 
> collision detection h/w and stuff like that. Don't know if it's a 
> real master/slave system on the h/w level. Ethernet is not... With 
> P-P connections only, it's irrelevant, as long as you can keep any 
> such logic out of the way.

Gigabit is fundamentally different to 100meg, but I dont know in exactly
what way. I think it might be point to point, not a bus. 1394 is a serial
bus.

1394 cards typically have 3 or 4 ports, and the entire system is
syncronous, so in theory it would be much easier to hook up a network of
1394 linked machines for this sort of job, but the linux support is less
mature than for 100meg ethernet. The topology in 1394 network basicly
doesnt matter - you can just string the machines together in a line (using
two ports per machine) and it will have the same performance as a star.

I've a feeling thier might be a 64 node limit on flat 1394 networks, but
I dont know where that number came from :) I've never tried linking more
than 3 machines together, but I'm sure there are people on the linux-1394
list who have.

- Steve