Company
Date Published
Author
Luis Héctor Chávez
Word count
706
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

We have announced the availability of system-wide audio integration in Repl, an interactive coding environment, as part of our commitment to making programming more accessible and fun. To opt-in, users create a secret with value 1 and restart their repl by running a shell command, enabling a checkbox for headphones in the lower right corner of the VNC output window. The system audio integration uses PulseAudio and an RFB protocol extension to deliver compressed audio alongside Remote Framebuffer, reducing bandwidth consumption and maintenance overhead. A new Rust-based proxy, rfbproxy, connects to both XtigerVNC and PulseAudio, transcodes audio into an Opus stream in a WebM container, and delivers a unified RFB stream to the NoVNC client. However, users may experience known limitations such as latency and issues with Safari playback due to browser security models and OS resource constraints.