Icecast - May 2011 - OGG stream drops after every couple/few tracks

Hi all,

First question on this list - I am running into issues with my embedded
OGG stream players (so far I've used ffmp3 and just today started trying
jlgui), and honestly I'm not sure what's up. I'm hoping someone
would be
kind enough to help me figure it out.

Basically, I have a setup that pulls a number of OGG files from MPD (all
the same bitrate/etc AFAIK)

In ffmp3, when the stream breaks/stops playing (after 1-4 songs, always
at the beginning of the next track) I get the following error repeated
across the flash player graphic:

"demuxer.hx:127 unexpected error"

Federico, the developer of ffmp3, told me that it's a part of the FOGG
library that's breaking.

When the stream breaks, I can look at my Icecast status and it still
thinks there is a connected stream.

The same issue seems to crop up when I use fallback mountpoints (to go
from a playlist/autoDJ to live and back). Audacious doesn't experience
this issue and handles the mountpoint jumping just fine.

I don't see anything in my icecast logs (or stream generator logs, which
I've used Ices2 as well as MPD when it experiences the error above) that
indicate streams dropping when they do, and it seems that when I use a
stream client such as Audacious, the stream doesn't drop (though it has
in the past with Totem). So I'm confident it's the stream client itself,
but with multiple clients experiencing the same issue, I'm scratching my
head as to what it could be in common with all of them.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. I'll provide whatever
configuration snippets anyone might need to help pinpoint the issue. I
really want to stick with OGG streaming and not go to MP3 as I believe
in open codecs, and honestly they are much more flexible with what I'm
trying to accomplish. It breaks my heart to see so many people in
mailing lists/forums say "I'll just start streaming in MP3 and the
problem will go away". I want to try and help OGG streaming get fixed in
these situations instead.


My server's info:
$ uname -a
Linux socorock 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Mar 7 21:35:22 UTC 2011 x86_64
GNU/Linux

$ dpkg -l|grep icecast
ii  icecast2       2.3.2-6  Ogg Vorbis and MP3 streaming media server

$ dpkg -l|grep mpd
ii  libmpdclient2  2.3-1   client library for the Music Player Daemon
ii  mpd            0.15.12-1.1     Music Player Daemon



Cheers,
Jordan

On 05/19/2011 05:25 PM, The Darkener wrote:
> Basically, I have a setup that pulls a number of OGG files from MPD (all
> the same bitrate/etc AFAIK)
>   
I verified this today by removing the files I had found to be encoded at
a different bitrate out of my playlist - might have been co-incidence,
but it took a lot longer for the stream to die, but it did die eventually.

Hi,

At this moment I'm running a stream on 128kbps. 
I want to add the same stream on 24 kbps. 
Can this be done on the server using icecast? 
Or do I have to use another programm.

Thanks for your time.

Jack

On 20 May 2011 05:30, Jack Raats <jack at jarasoft.net>
wrote:
> Hi,
Hi
> At this moment I'm running a stream on 128kbps.
> I want to add the same stream on 24 kbps.
> Can this be done on the server using icecast?
> Or do I have to use another programm.
The streamTranscoder is a multi-platform utility which can be used to
transcode media streams from one format to another, and from one
server type to another. It will read in streams of type MP3 and Vorbis
from most servers (Icecast, Icecast2, Shoutcast), convert it into
various formats, and send to various streaming servers.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/streamtranscoder
> Thanks for your time.
No problem.
> Jack

On Fri, 20 May 2011, Jack Raats wrote:
> At this moment I'm running a stream on 128kbps.
> I want to add the same stream on 24 kbps.
> Can this be done on the server using icecast?
> Or do I have to use another programm.
Icecast can handle the extra stream, but it can't generate it.

I recommend StreamTranscoder for doing this.  StreamTranscoderV3 was on 
OddSock.org which no longer hosts compiled binaries.  You can still get 
the sources from the Subversion repository at 
http://svn.oddsock.org/public/trunk/streamTranscoderv3/ which, depending 
on how you are with compiling things, may or may not suit you.

There's absolutely no documentation for this program, but I wrote up steps 
on how to configure it back in February 2006. 
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/icecast/2006-February/010295.html

I've been using it successfully in a number of settings ever since. 
I've
not tried AAC with it, and some search results suggest that you might need 
to apply a patch to the configure script in order to get it to work, but 
that patch is easy enough to find.  I plan to play with this myself 
shortly so I can post back here if this is of interest to anyone.

Geoff.