Icecast - Aug 2004 - Suggestion: The ability to limit the number of ICY connections

On Fri, 21 May 2004, Jack Moffitt wrote:
> Maybe this is a stupid question, but why don't you just use
Oddsock's
> plugins which support the better protocol?
Not a stupid question.  There's three considerations.

1.  This project has around fifty broadcasters.  It has been running for
3.5 years, and whilst some have moved to using plugins like SAM which
(presumably) does support the icecast 2 protocol and a few of us use Linux,
many still use the Shoutcast DSP.  Changing all these people across will
not be an easy process.  Plus, quite a number use OTS DJ to broadcast with,
and I'm at least not aware of any instructions on how to get it to play
ball with Odcast (though the list of changes on the site certainly suggests
it can be done).

2.  This is a project where all the broadcasters, myself included, are
blind.  Last time I tried it, and admittedly it was a long time ago,
Oddcast presented some issues with regard to screen reader accessibility.
I should really run it up the stick again to see what it's like nowadays.

3.  Quite a lot of our broadcasters are very fond of the FHG encoder.  At
least for now, we broadcast at 56kbps 22050Hz stereo, and whilst LAME has
made some great strides at this bitrate in recent times (I use it myself
under Linux and am quite happy with it), the FHG encoder does sound good at
this rate and I know some would be loathed to give it up.  At least as far
as I'm aware, there's no way for Oddcast to make use of Windows codecs,
so
it'd presumably be LAME or nothing.

With regard to this last point, one of the things we're looking at is
changing to Ogg Vorbis, which would solve most of this (point 2 would still
be valid, however).  Our main problem is that we are a project of a
non-profit organisation and have limited resources.  We support our
broadband MP3 listeners through a server relay provided by Nullsoft, so
unless we could find a low-cost or free provider of bandwidth for our
broadband stream, I'd think it unlikely that we'd be able to change.

Anyone interested in the project can visit http://interactive.acbradio.org

Anyway, all of this aside, Icecast does offer backward compatibility with
the shoutcast technology and I would think this feature would help those in
a position of having to stick with an ICY source.

Geoff.

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On Mon, 24 May 2004, oddsock wrote:
> I released a blind-friendly version of oddcast a long time ago, but
haven't
> really had any feedback (actually zero feedback) from anyone whose actually
> tried to use it...I recoded the main UI to use common windows controls in
> the hope that it would then become more blind-accessible... your feedback
> is most welcome.. http://www.oddsock.org/tools/oddcastv2_wa2_bf/
Oh man!  I never saw anything about this anywhere.  I'll get some of us to
test it and give you some feedback.

Geoff.

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At 07:12 PM 5/21/2004, you wrote:
>2.  This is a project where all the broadcasters, myself included, are
>blind.  Last time I tried it, and admittedly it was a long time ago,
>Oddcast presented some issues with regard to screen reader accessibility.
>I should really run it up the stick again to see what it's like
nowadays.
I released a blind-friendly version of oddcast a long time ago, but haven't 
really had any feedback (actually zero feedback) from anyone whose actually 
tried to use it...I recoded the main UI to use common windows controls in 
the hope that it would then become more blind-accessible... your feedback 
is most welcome.. http://www.oddsock.org/tools/oddcastv2_wa2_bf/
>3.  Quite a lot of our broadcasters are very fond of the FHG encoder.  At
>least for now, we broadcast at 56kbps 22050Hz stereo, and whilst LAME has
>made some great strides at this bitrate in recent times (I use it myself
>under Linux and am quite happy with it), the FHG encoder does sound good at
>this rate and I know some would be loathed to give it up.  At least as far
>as I'm aware, there's no way for Oddcast to make use of Windows
codecs, so
>it'd presumably be LAME or nothing.
this is true, and honestly I have no plans to start using the windows ACM 
to support FHG.
>Anyway, all of this aside, Icecast does offer backward compatibility with
>the shoutcast technology and I would think this feature would help those in
>a position of having to stick with an ICY source.
it's unfortunate that we do not support the source client protocol that 
Shoutcast uses, and we certainly could do so, although code-wise it would 
be a huge hack on a fairly well designed system.  Due to it's 
unconventional protocol, we would have to write a whole mess of special 
handling for this case, not using a lot of our common code, and have 
constant "If (shoutcast_source_client)" type switches in the code. 
This is
clearly not desirable or even really acceptable for us.  So this is truly 
why the shoutcast DSP is not supported in icecast2.

oddsock 

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