I’m using a RPi3B+ with a pHAT DAC, running mpd on Raspbian/buster, as my main music player. It’s (mostly) headless so it’s currently set up to use ALSA directly. I have another PC with Arch Linux/GNOME 3 that I use for watching videos etc, but I’m running out of inputs on my amplifier so I would like to install pulseaudio on the Pi and use it as a server for audio from the other PC.
Has anybody here done something like this already? I’m reasonably confident I can get it working, but I’ll have to learn things the hard way, so some tips would be handy. I’ll need to start PA in server mode via systemd, and work out whether it’s best to try to get a single instance to run in session mode and server mode simultaneously, or just set it up so mpd etc can use the server on localhost. Then configure the other desktop to use the remote server.
Another important point: is the latency good enough that I won’t suffer a noticeable lack of sync between video and audio? Both machines are on the same LAN, but the PC is connected by ethernet via a switch and the Pi by wifi via a WAP.