Icecast 2.0 Released

ArcRiley writes "After 3 years of development and 6 weeks of beta testing, Icecast 2.0 has been officially released! Features include support for both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, a web administration interface, support for listing in directories (such as dir.xiph.org), and is freely available under the GNU GPL for Linux and Windows."

Icecast is great..

[iantri]

Icecast is a great piece of software.. I use it to stream music to myself when I am away from my PC.

Any idea if there is a better interface for controlling which songs play, yet?

Before, IIRC it could only shuffle through a bunch of files in a directory.

Autodisconnect from relays

[kaos_]

I'd like to run Icecast in our office relaying to some external streams to utilize bandwidth for many listeners. Unfortunately, Icecast stays connected to the relays even when there are no listeners, which is a waste. I remember earlier versions of Icecast had this feature, but it has now since gone.

for non-pro/home broadcasting to take off

[osmethnee]

for non-pro/home broadcasting to take off, there needs to be an underlying p2p network layer. This is particularly true as live video-streaming becomes more popular. http://www.peercast.org/ exists, but sadly doesn't seem to have been updated for 9 months, and activity in their forum is fairly low.

Alternative Ogg codecs?

[FrostedWheat]

Does this support non-Vorbis Ogg codecs such as Speex or FLAC?

Re:You'd think 3 years of development...

[el-spectre]

Nah, Alphas are typically expected to be buggy... they might work, but haven't been hardened against hacks, network glitches, stupid users...

Betas are supposed to be functional, 'lets find the last few problems' kinda releases. Release candidates are high quality beta relases, usually.

Icecast vs. Shoutcast?

[alexatrit]

I used to run small stations in college, using Shoutcast on both Windows and FreeBSD. Very simple to install and run. I've read the Icecast FAQ, and I'm a bit confused. It says that it's compatible with Shoutcast servers. Does this mean shoutcast.com's listing servers? Has anyone seen how Shoutcast and Icecast compare as far as memory footprint, system usage, bandwidth usage? or are they more or less the same?

Eric S Rayrnond (739458) != ESR (3702)

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you trying to impersonate Eric S. Raymond? Your account seems to be new (only two comments posted so far) and you are trying to fool people by having a name spelled Rayrnond instead of Raymond.

Most Slashdot users know that the real Eric S. Raymond uses the account name ESR [slashdot.org].

I have to admit

[silence535]

that I was somehow annoyed that they declared the old version (1.3.2 or something?) as deprecated long time before releasing 2.0. And the website has been unmaintained for quite a long period of those three years.
Actually I turned off my little community-radio-streaming-project just because ogg support was flaky and administration and monitoring was difficult.

But hey, it is always easy to bitch and not to help hands on.

Maybe now Iwill pick up this thing again..

-silence

Ogg rules

[wfberg]

.. especially for streaming, since a 64kbps stream sounds as good as a 128kbps mp3 stream, which means more people can listen to it, even on their congested at-work LANs, and if you don't attract more people, then at least you cut your bandwidth bill in half. Other codecs that sound sweet at 64kbps exist (windows media, real, quicktime) but they're not free, so you end up paying more than you save in bandwidth.

And if you go legal with your streams, some licensing authorities (for want of a better word) haven't been clued in to how good ogg sounds at half the bitrate, so they'll give you a sucky-quality discount.

If you want to go legal w.r.t. streaming BigFive content in The Netherlands, I don't recommend it btw. BUMA/Stemra seem to have a process in place that's relatively sane (i.e. flat fee for non-commercial use) but you ALSO have to pay SENA (not that it's not spelled SANE..) who are total fucktards in their pricingstructure (BUMA/Stemra are fucktards as well, but at least the pricing schedules seem doable. Anyway, having investigated the options I decided against it (and no, I don't stream unlicensed either).

Re:Icecast vs. Shoutcast?

[autechre]

icecast is supposed to be able to get you listed in both icecast and shoutcast directory servers, though some people have had trouble with this.

We started out running shoutcast after deciding to ditch Real. I moved to icecast mainly because the source was available and it was in Debian. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from Real's software keeping one of our servers stuck on kernel 2.0 and glibc 2.0, and I don't want to run anything dependent on one entity recompiling it.

I wonder if they fixed...

[bigberk]

All icecast 2 betas I tried were missing a vital feature; the ability to flood audio data out at the start of the TCP connection (rather than deliver it at the stream bitrate) -- this is vital because when you take too long delivering the data your stream can die due to filled queues.

For example, there may be temporary packet loss on the network that results in TCP data queueing up at the sending side. Now unless icecast can correct for that rate mismatch, you're consistently behind and eventually the stream dies.

I think they might have now added the fix, which is to step up its send rate from the stream bitrate whenever it has to, i.e. whenever the client falls behind (temporary network glitch). The unfortunate result otherwise is that your streams can die on a flaky network connection, even if the average bandwidth over time is more than enough to handle the audio stream!

Or... let me know, try my stream [pc9.org]
. Does it die on you quite quickly after connect?

Re:Alternative Ogg codecs? (with OggFile)

[ArcRiley]

I think Ogg needs it's own framework for codec plugins, if for no other reason than for media players that want to support Ogg but don't want to include Gstreamer as a dependency.

Also OggFile is going to be useful for functions other than encoding/decoding. Having direct access to libogg2 means being able to do things like bitstream manipulations (cutting, pasting, etc) and, of course, Icecast and libshout (neither of which do encoding/decoding, but just stream pacing).

It seems like Gstreamer supporting Ogg codecs directly is a redundency which should be replaced by OggFile, not an argument against OggFile's development.

Re:You'd think 3 years of development...

[Anonymous Coward]

has many features and functions you would expect from a world class streaming media server.

Except some important relaying functionality is now dropped. In icecast 1 a relay would time out and stop sourcing the stream if no users are connected to it for a while, and resume the stream if someone connected. Good for saving bandwidth automatically. As far as I can tell this is gone from v2.