[icecast-dev] Icecast 2: planned stuff.

Pierre Amadio
Fri, 06 Aug 2004 14:57:30 -0000

Hi there.

First, some words about what the context is over here.

I'm a member of a french working group assembling several non profit
organisation members that intend to help promoting free software usage,
and in this case ogg vorbis and icecast.

http://www.aful.org/gdt/interop/casRadioFrance.html

Non profit organisation included in this group are Abul
(www.abul.org), Aful (www.aful.org), April (www.april.org)
and i may forget some :)

Our main concern in this project is to be able to show there are free
software solution that can stream audio data and to improve those
solution to be as easy to use and install as possible.

One of our member works in a computer school and intend to propose
icecast improvement as a student project that will count something
like 6 student.

Right now several ideas of improvement have been thinked about, lots
of those existing in icecast 1.

- multi language possibility.
- syslog logging
- kicking client function.
- switching player client to an other mountpoint function.
- switching source client to an other mountpoint function.
- having a way to compute a network quality indicator for each clients.
- using this indicator to automatically switch player client to an other
mounpoint streaming same data in lesser quality in case of bad network.
- having a nice graphical or web interface around this.
- packaging and 'install it for dummies' solution.

I'm a bit worried about how can our effort be coordinated with yours.
That's the reason i would be please to know what are the improvement you
already plan to code, and those you don't.

How would you imagine our collaboration could be done ? Do you think we
could ask you to host mailing list,web,cvs and stuff or would you prefer
we use our own solution ?

> The only supported way of doing this is by fetching /admin/stats.xml (or
> /stats.xml on slightly older versions). This is structured in such a way
that
> getting the relevent data out is easy. Also, the xsl templates (which are
> automatically applied to this xml data) can be used to create a web
interface
> (with some limitations - but not too many).

/admin/stats.xml looks exactly as what i need for having live
information about server status. What about a POST or GET method to be
able to change configuration settings and send commands (like kicking
and improvement idea above) to the server ?

> Documentation help would be very welcome - just send anything to me, or to
the
> mailing list.

May be Ciaran Anscomb (http://www.6809.org.uk/kja3/ices2-howto.shtml)
and/or Kerry Cox (http://quasi.ksl.com/icecast/) would be interested
joining the effort too. Would it be possible to have a cvs documentation
module writing acces somewhere ? If not, i guess savannah
(http://savannah.gnu.org/)
would be a solution but having the most centralised stuff as possible
sounds like a good idea.

What format (raw text/html/docbook/whatever ?) do you think would be the
best choice to use ?

Have a nice day.

Pierre Amadio