Watching it in another room

The machine normally draws on the television it is plugged into. When the singing is in a room with a television and no machine, stream the screen there instead. The machine sends its picture and its sound over your network, and the other television plays them in a browser or a player.

Start the stream

Every install has a second launcher that starts the machine streaming, with nothing to type. Its icon has a broadcast badge in the corner.

From a shell, karaokemachine --stream does the same. The flag applies to that run only, and the machine refuses it together with --headless.

A streaming machine opens no window, because it sends the screen to an encoder instead of a television. On Windows it shows an icon in the notification area, and on macOS in the menu bar. The icon names the address a phone can reach, and it follows that address as the network changes. Its Remote, Watch and Setup entries open the three pages the machine serves.

Open it on the other television

You have two ways to watch, and both start from the machine’s address.

• In a browser, open http://<the machine>/watch/. The page runs under half a second behind the machine.
• In a player, open http://<the machine>/stream/live.m3u8. A television’s own player, VLC, Kodi or a set-top box plays it. A player runs three or four seconds behind.

The page is faster because it takes the stream over a WebSocket where the browser can. Where the browser cannot, the page plays the playlist. A machine that does not stream serves neither address.

Queue songs from a phone as usual. See The remotes.

What a stream costs

• It runs behind the machine. When you press pause, the music continues for that long before it stops.
• It carries only the backing track. The microphones go to a hardware mixer and never reach the machine, so no voice is in the stream.

If the picture stops to buffer

An older television may stop to buffer. The fix depends on how you watch.

• On the page, open /watch/?hls to play the playlist instead.
• In a player, set stream.segment_seconds to 2 in settings.json. The stream then plays smoothly, a few seconds further behind.