Hi all, I'm new to the streaming audio thing, but have been a linux user for 7 or 8 years. Here's some background: I work in a really EMI-nasty environment that prevents receiving radio broadcasts. In order to listen to sporting events, local news, etc. I planned to set up icecast to stream live audio snatched from a radio at home, and listen to it at work. I installed icecast, libshout, etc. on my linux box at home without any problem. I also installed ices-0.4 and ices 2 so I could do ogg and mp3 data types. I have lame, xmms, , libogg and liborvis (or whatever the libraries are called). I'm connected via a 256kb DSL line at home and several T1s at work. To test my setup, I created playlists. One uses mp3s and one uses ogg files. both ices versions point to their respective playlists and start up OK. The problem occurs in both MP3 and ogg "streams". My browser sees the mountpoints and connects to them, but the all systems I've tried to connect from (A windows box and 2 Sun stations) insist on downloading the entire contents of the playlist before playing anything. For example, my mp3 playlist has ~100 songs in it. When I connect to the mountpoint, the system wants to download all 100 songs before it will begin playing. The way it's set up now, I might as well just place my music files on the Apache server and play them one at a time. It is not streaming the audio. Thus, I have not yet tried ices-live. I've been through all the READMEs, docs, and read several mailing lists. Am I missing something stupid here? Thanks, Scott
Hi: Using your own words, yes you're missing something stupid. :) It sounds like the streaming is working just fine. The problem is in how you're launching the stream at your end. This *is* mentioned in the docs, but it's not as clear as it might be so I'll mention it again (it's a common question). You can't open the broadcast URL directly with your web browser directly, as most/all of them don't know what program should open them and some at least won't let you open a URL directly with another application. So the way everyone does it is to use a playlist file with the URL of the stream, if you want to open it from a web browser. Fortunately Icecast has playlist generation built-in (assuming you've set the hostname element correctly in the icecast config file). You can type the following into your browser: http://server:port/mountpoint.m3u where server, port and mountpoint are replaced with the appropriate values. For example, if I've running Icecast on server.com on port 8000 and have a stream up called live.ogg, the URL would be: http://server.com:8000/live.ogg.m3u This will return a .M3U file with the URL of the actual stream in it, which your player can use to fetch the stream. Alternatively, you can put the stream URL directly into your player's open location dialog box. Hope this helps. Geoff. -- Geoff Shang <geoff at hitsandpieces.net> Phone: +61-418-96-5590 MSN: geoff at acbradio.org Make sure your E-mail can be read by everyone! http://www.betips.net/etc/evilmail.html Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html