Sharing soundcard to network

Question

Let's suppose I have a laptop (L) and desktop PC (D), both with Windows 7 onboard.

It is SB X-Fi extreme soundcard with rather good 5.1 home theater connected. But it is not comfortable to watch video sitting on the sofa from my desktop (sofa is in the center of the room and D is in the corner), even though it is 23" monitor. So I'm watching everything from the laptop.

So the question - is it possible somehow to "share" soundcard from D to L, so I will watch the video from notebook and listen the sound from the 5.1?

L and D are connected via wi-fi (fast enough).

Answer 1

Try setting up a stream with VLC, such that it runs on your desktop and your laptop.

Then let your desktop play the audio through the speakers and mute it on the laptop.

Here's a nice tutorial for setting up the stream from WikiHow

1. First, you need to download VLC.
2. Install it on each computer that you want to be able to watch the streams.
3. Run VLC on the main computer. This is going to be the "master", which will be broadcasting to all the others. The "master" won't show video locally. You'll have to open a new VLC and connect like others if you want to watch on the main computer.
4. Click File, then Wizard (ctrl+W in XP). This opens the streaming/transcoding wizard. Make sure Stream to Network is selected and click Next.
5. For the Input screen, you have two choices. If the file/disc is already in the playlist, then go with Existing Playlist Item and select the appropriate item from the list you want to play. Conversely, you can Select a Stream to choose from a browse box which files/disc to play . After getting the playlist set up, click Next.
6. On the Streaming screen, select RTPS. Click Next.
7. Click Next again for the Encapsulation Format.
8. For Additional Streaming Options, enter one for Time-to-Live
9. Under Time-to-Live is SAP announce. Check the box and enter a name or phrase that will identify the stream for people in their playlists, like Elm Street Theater, or Casablanca... whatever.
10. Now click Finish to begin the streaming of the files.
11. Open another VLC instance (on another computer or the same computer) and open the Playlist (ctrl+P in XP). Click Manage, Services Discovery, then SAP announcements. An item should appear in your playlist called, strangely enough, Session announcements. The default time for announcements is 5 minutes. After that time you should see the name or phrase for your stream under the Announcements item. Double click on the name and it should start playing.
12. If you don't want to wait for the SAP, go to File, Open Network Stream. Choose UDP/RTP Multicast and enter the multicast address that the video is being broadcast to/on. Leave the port numbers alone and click Ok to begin the video playing on the remote VLC.

Here's the official documentation from VLC.