Stream Audio over LAN, Linux -> Windows, Debian 8

Question

Tried ping between computer's static IP's connected by router (General failure).

Therefore UDP direct connection attempts went nowhere.

Tried using ffplay and pulse to stream audio, but Debian 8 is finicky with PulseAudio.

AlsaMixer displays that there is an analog audio device, and the sound works, and the device is Pulse.

Most pactl arguments return "Connection refused, Access Denied."

Tried setting default sink in system.pa and default.pa to HDMI source but the pactl list sinks shows HDMI is Suspended.

It turns out I have a capture card in the system I want to get audio to, but the HDMI is "unplugged" in pavucontrol. An AMD and NVIDIA GPU were tried.

If I were to get networking going between the two computers, since the configuration is wired LAN, going back to streaming audio as the solution would be effective. That or perhaps getting the HDMI capture card to capture audio, as it does capture video. Rather, a different Linux distro entirely.

Answer 1

While most problems seemed to be barriers, in this case pactl was functional when it came to changing the default sink in the command line whereas I had been changing it via the default.pa file.

So effectively:

pactl list sinks 
(to acquire the HDMI audio device.)
 
pactl set-default-sink [HDMI audio device]

Then in the desktop environment's audio control panel, trying 
each HDMI device while having pavucontrol running and 
visually present. Eventually pavucontrol listed the device 
status from "unplugged" to "plugged in."

This was the capture card solution. The network streaming is another matter. The classic case of using shell arguments versus configuration files and then the elusive visual confirmation of what is not working.