Play audio over network with Windows 7?

This answer is a little late but I figured I'd post it in case someone is looking for a solution in the future. There is a piece of software called Airfoil that has this exact functionality. It also lets you stream to PCs, MACs, Linux, iPhones, iPod Touches, Apple TV, and more.

"You htpc likely has a line-in jack on the audio card. Just run an audio patch cable there from your source computer's speaker jack.

Here's an example

That cable is only 6ft, but you get longer ones or combine it with an extension cable."

"Try github.com/duncanthrax/scream for a simple VirtualAudio driver. This might not be as good as Airfoil, but has very low lag time, hence usable for videos (VLC with timing adjustment). Using this between 2 Windows PCs using an Ethernet cable gave ~500ms lag, so not for gaming.

I tried Airfoil and while it does have a lot of features, the amount of lag (~3 seconds on direct Ethernet) when sending audio from Airfoil to Airfoil Satellite (Windows) is too high to make it useful for anything other than music(sound only)."

"Here's a solution that worked for me from Ubuntu to Windows 10 without trouble:
# Windows (receiver) side:
.\ffplay.exe -nodisp -ac 2 -acodec pcm_u8 -ar 48000 -analyzeduration 0 -probesize 32 -f u8 -i udp://0.0.0.0:18181?listen=1

# Linux (transmitter) side:
pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=remote
ffmpeg -f pulse -i ""remote.monitor"" -ac 2 -acodec pcm_u8 -ar 48000 -f u8 ""udp://<RECEIVER IP HERE>:18181""

For this you need to download ffplay included in ffmpeg.
The latency is several seconds right now though so will not work for many use cases. Might be fixable with some tweaking."