[icecast] Problems with xmms & freeamp

Michael Smith
Fri, 06 Aug 2004 14:22:46 -0000

At 11:59 PM 2/3/02 +1100, you wrote:
>
>Hi all,
>
>I've just set up a test icecast2 server (download and compiled from cvs
>about an hour ago) - very simple setup, all it does is use ices to stream
>in an .ogg file that I converted from an mp3, using mpg123 & oggenc.
>(I've used the sample conf files with the directory stuff removed.
I've
>also tried it with and without the re-encoding lines from the
>ices-playlist.xml file).
>
>Now, this works beautifully if I play the stream with ogg123, but if I
>try to play it using xmms, it just buffers the stream over and over
>again (ie, it says Pre-Buffering 8KB... 16KB ... 24KB ... 32KB, shows
>the title quickly and then does that again and again...).
>
>If I try and play it with Freeamp, it says "Buffering up ... 20% ...
50%
>... 100%" and then "Skipped corrupted file", and stops. No
sound from
>either of the two programs.
>
>Now, the funny bit is that both XMMS and Freeamp work perfectly with the
>Ogg streams that the BBC have put up.
>
>Any ideas? I'm running it all on Debian Linux (latest sid stuff).
>

I just finished helping out another user with a similar problem -
you've probably hit the same difficulty.

Many of the really common media players (xmms, winamp, and presumably
freeamp) have... design problems, that mean they don't actually know
what to decode a stream with. So they try to decode using the mp3
code, generally. In most of these cases, this is overridden for vorbis
streams only if the stream url ends with .ogg (because there's no
better way to do it that will work without major restructuring of
the players - this SHOULD be detected based on content-type, but isn't).

So, if you change your mountpoint to end with .ogg, the players
generally work much better. This is why the bbc streams, for example,
have urls like http://ogg.bbc.co.uk:8001/radio1_high.ogg - to 'trick'
broken players into decoding it correctly.

I'll add a sentence or two explaining this to the ices README file
sometime soon.

Michael

(wondering where he recognises the name Paul Dwerryhouse from...)