duncanthrax

scream

C++2018–2022

duncanthrax / scream

scream

Virtual network sound card for Microsoft Windows

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5Distinct people

6Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

1.9KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Virtual network sound card for Microsoft Windows

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-08-04 17:24:44 UTC to 2022-06-21 17:18:54 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	1	2
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	0	2
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

6 sources

drbawb·Jun 21, 2022

My main workstation runs Linux. It has a second GPU (NVIDIA RTX 2080 Super), USB 3.1 card, and an NVMe drive passed to a guest via PCIe passthrough.[1] I have a 2x2 DisplayPort 1.4 KVM to drive my monitors with the host GPU on one side, and the guest GPU on the other side. The peripherals are connected to the host through any open USB port, and the guest through the PCIe add-in card. Audio is handled with Scream[2] mostly so I can get >65536Hz sample rate. (Really terrible things seem to happen if you try to boot a qemu guest w/ the emulated audio attached to pipewire-pulse when the DSP graph has a 96/192KHz sample rate. I've also had latency issues in the past w/ bonafide pulseaudio and the emulated audio card.) I do all my gaming and most of my browsing inside the Windows VM, which is bridged to my usual data VLAN. The linux host is whe

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re I do development work which lives on a separate experimental VLAN. Other than that I run a few LXC containers for various services needed for running the LAN. (DNS, mail, VPNs, etc.) - I just want that stuff logically separated so that they can either (a) be moved to my new workstation in 2024, or (b) if one breaks it can just be rebuilt from scratch without affecting the others. It's also nice because I can use whatever distro works best for that particular package. [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF [2]: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream

In Ask HN: What do you use VMs for regularly?

binarybanana·Jun 28, 2021

It's gotten much easier with Nvidia cards thanks to VM gaming being officially supported. No more hiding the VM and that Error 47 nonsense. Basically you bind the graphics card to the vfio driver by writing the PCI ID to /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id and then you can use it in qemu with -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0. If you have sane IOMMU groups and have an extra GPU for the host it should work with just those two steps. You still have to decide about how you handle input and output, but that's very user specific. Virtual input over the qemu GUI works well enough, there's also an evdev thing that lets you switch by pressing both Ctrl keys, or pass an entire USB controller. For audio I recommend scream[1] for the lowest latency (I get 2ms VM->PA->Speaker with MuQSS scheduler) with full 7.1 audio and if you don't want a dedicated mo

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nitor or switch monitor inputs there is Looking Glass[2] which captures frames and shuffles them to the host over shared memory. It also handles input via spice. It's still a bit of work, but for me that's mostly on the Windows side rather than the passthrough stuff itself. [1]: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream [2]: https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass

In I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

binarybanana·Jun 20, 2021

In my experience the whole VFIO subsystem is quite stable and at least Nvidia hardware can be detached and attached to a different driver without any difficulty. Intel GPUs have trouble being reattached to the host because of driver issues and AMD needs workarounds because of hardware level bugs. Also, if you have a laptop, or a desktop Intel, you already have a perfectly usable GPU that the host can use included in the CPU! It's true that setting up everything can take some time to get it working, but it depends very much on the hardware. In most cases on a desktop system all you need to do is select the right PCI device in libvirt's GUI and it should work. On laptops you need to hack together a custom OVMF UEFI firmware imagine with the VBIOS included, but there are ways to auto-generate it [1]. Input can be handled in multiple ways, wh

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ich makes most sense depends on if you want to use dedicated output, or if you want to stream the output back to the host using something like Looking Glass. I just have a virtual qxl GPU in the VM which lets me use the qemu window for input and that works fine. For audio there is scream[2], which gives me super-low latency 7.1 audio. According to pulseaudio latency is under 2ms in addition to whatever latency Windows itself has. I use a -ck kernel with MuQSS scheduler, the default scheduler won't be able to go that low. I mean it can be tricky to set up, but if the hardware is capable it shouldn't be more than a weekend project. Once set up it's rock solid stability wise and compatibility is the same as bare metal. Caveat is some online games consider running in a VM cheating, but that doesn't affect me. It's not for everyone, but neither is Linux as a desktop OS Overall I consider this the holy grail for those that want to primarily run Linux but don't want to give up games or deal with wine/proton issues. Actual dual booting is completely obsolete with GPU passthrough in my opinion. YMMV, depending on what you play and your exact hardware. [1]: https://github.com/bitthief/ovmf-with-vbios-patch [2]: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream

In State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

deadcow·Dec 20, 2018

For sound I would recommend scream: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream I've been using it in my KVM PCI passthrough VM for some months and it works well.

In VirtualBox 6.0 released

justinclift·Aug 5, 2018

Looking through the source, this implementation is only stereo (so far). Might not be too hard to expand that out to 5.7/7.1. https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream/blob/35bc85bd830fe40e8...

In Scream – virtual network sound card for Windows

ivank·Aug 4, 2018Submission

Scream – virtual network sound card for Windows

106 points · Open discussion