Icecast dev - Jan 2005 - New feature : peercasting / anonymous relay / burst

Hi,

We could use the unused bandwidth of icecast servers who agree.

I think this feature could be great for Icecast, imagine :
in the config file you can enable a flag that will tell Icecast to
update its status in the yellow pages / stream directory / whatever
central server with the bandwidth that is currently used and the total
amount of available bandwidth if you agree to share it. Then other
Icecasts who don't have a lot of bandwidth or who suddenly have a lot
of listeners can use the Icecast that has unused bandwidth as a relay
and update the yellow pages to say that a new relay is available.

For instance I use the bandwidth I dedicated to Icecast may be once a
month when I put some new songs on my stream but the rest of the time
I would agree to be a relay for anybody who needs my bandwidth. And
sometimes I would like to have relays for my extra listeners.
Of course not every server can be a relay, if the relay eats one place
in the stream and relays only for one listener it makes no sense so
some resource checkings are needed. It's a kind of peercasting that
allows a burst for a while.
If I could code I would make it, but I can't so I post it here :)

Anybody could stream to a lot a people if it can work.
What do you think?

Bastien Rocheron