Hello everyone, I sent the last email prematurely - I had a few more questions. I don't wish to start a holy war here, but are there certain OSs / Distros that are preferred for running very busy icecast servers? We're a Solaris shop currently, but don't mind using linux or BSD if that would make things easier. I see there is a Fedora Core RPM on the icecast page - does that indicate that Redhad would be a preferred distro to use? What are people's experience around here that run large (20k plus listener) icecast setups? What hardware / OSs do you use and why? Also, can icecast relay WMA9? We decided to go with the Spacial Audio SOS product to deal with AFTRA requirements, and it supports encoding to mp3, mp3pro, WMA9, and OGG - is it much of a headache to have an icecast server be able to relay mp3 and WMA9 streams at the same time? Thanks for your help -- Michael Hale <giftculture@gmail.com> gift culture http://www.gift-culture.org init string http://www.initstring.org amm http://www.artificialmusicmachine.com
On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 19:27, Michael Hale wrote:> Hello everyone, > > I sent the last email prematurely - I had a few more questions. Iicecast can bind to specific IPs if required or else it listens on all interfaces. As for limits on a Gig-e card, the listener number will depend on the stream bitrate, but there are no internal application limits AFAICT except for those you impose via the xml.> don't wish to start a holy war here, but are there certain OSs / > Distros that are preferred for running very busy icecast servers? > We're a Solaris shop currently, but don't mind using linux or BSD if > that would make things easier.The code is made to be as compatible as it can be, but many people are running icecast on linux-based systems. We don't (deliberately at least) build for 1 system or another but it does depend on what we have access to. The problem with building pre-built packages is knowing what people have eg do they have theora or curl etc, some are fairly common so don't tend to be a problem.> I see there is a Fedora Core RPM on the icecast page - does that > indicate that Redhad would be a preferred distro to use?we prefer to send out tar files (source code) because trying to organise prebuilt packages is hard but we certainly don't mind having people submit pre-built builds to us. ...> Also, can icecast relay WMA9? We decided to go with the Spacial Audio > SOS product to deal with AFTRA requirements, and it supports encoding > to mp3, mp3pro, WMA9, and OGG - is it much of a headache to have an > icecast server be able to relay mp3 and WMA9 streams at the same time?We handle any number of streams but for each one we either process Ogg (we are a xiph project after all) or passthrough others like mp3/aac/nsv etc. I don't know the format of WMA to comment on it specifically, if it requires special handling for streaming then icecast won't handle it. karl.
At 01:27 PM 8/31/2005, Michael Hale wrote:>Hello everyone, > >I sent the last email prematurely - I had a few more questions. I >don't wish to start a holy war here, but are there certain OSs / >Distros that are preferred for running very busy icecast servers? >We're a Solaris shop currently, but don't mind using linux or BSD if >that would make things easier. > >I see there is a Fedora Core RPM on the icecast page - does that >indicate that Redhad would be a preferred distro to use?the only reason we provide a Fedora RPM is because that what I had at the time of the release. I can't really answer "which platform best runs icecast" because there really isn't alot of data on it...>What are people's experience around here that run large (20k plus >listener) icecast setups? What hardware / OSs do you use and why?just so you know, but even the largest capacity servers that publish listener counts are in the thousand ranges, not tens of thousands. So you are going to have a hard time finding input on this level of usage.>Also, can icecast relay WMA9? We decided to go with the Spacial Audio >SOS product to deal with AFTRA requirements, and it supports encoding >to mp3, mp3pro, WMA9, and OGG - is it much of a headache to have an >icecast server be able to relay mp3 and WMA9 streams at the same time?icecast doesn't currently relay WMA streams. It is also not on our agenda either. Icecast is a XIPH project, and thus you can understand our desire to support and advocate the use of patent-free/royalty-free codecs. oddsock
On 8/31/05, Michael Hale <giftculture@gmail.com> wrote:> Hello everyone, > > I sent the last email prematurely - I had a few more questions. I > don't wish to start a holy war here, but are there certain OSs / > Distros that are preferred for running very busy icecast servers? > We're a Solaris shop currently, but don't mind using linux or BSD if > that would make things easier.Icecast gets more testing on linux, but other OSes should be fine. Icecast on solaris should scale just as well, I'd expect. However, notably we don't have much experience with very large icecast installations, and we've tended not to get much (if any) feedback from the few users who DO run very large installations, so we're not really all that sure how well it scales to thousands of users.> > I see there is a Fedora Core RPM on the icecast page - does that > indicate that Redhad would be a preferred distro to use?Not really. I'm not sure what linux distributions the other developers use, most of my development historically has been done on debian (though my current system is ubuntu) - but we generally leave the packaging to third parties.> > What are people's experience around here that run large (20k plus > listener) icecast setups? What hardware / OSs do you use and why?I don't know of any icecast setups of more than about 5k or so users, though they may exist. I'd expect some minor (and easily fixable if we actually had access to such large (real, rather than using synthetic clients) installations) scalability issues, but I could be wrong. I'd expect the windows version to have much more serious issues, other OSes such as linux, solaris, or *bsd should basically be fine,.> > Also, can icecast relay WMA9? We decided to go with the Spacial Audio > SOS product to deal with AFTRA requirements, and it supports encoding > to mp3, mp3pro, WMA9, and OGG - is it much of a headache to have an > icecast server be able to relay mp3 and WMA9 streams at the same time?Our primary aim is to have excellent support for free formats (primarily, this means the xiph codecs - we'd be happy to help out with any other freely usable formats, though). As a concession to existing icecast users, we have basic mp3 support (basically we just pass it through untouched), and this mechanism works for some other codecs as well. However, we will not add explicit support for any other formats, nor will we support usage of icecast with other formats (i.e. if it breaks, you're entirely on your own). I don't know if WMA9 requires explicit support or not. Mike
On Aug 31, 2005, at 4:19 PM, Michael Smith wrote:> > Our primary aim is to have excellent support for free formats > (primarily, this means the xiph codecs - we'd be happy to help out > with any other freely usable formats, though). As a concession to > existing icecast users, we have basic mp3 support (basically we just > pass it through untouched), and this mechanism works for some other > codecs as well. However, we will not add explicit support for any > other formats, nor will we support usage of icecast with other formats > (i.e. if it breaks, you're entirely on your own). I don't know if WMA9 > requires explicit support or not. > > Mike >Frankly, the only reason that I'm even considering relaying WMA9 is because a large number of listeners to the streams may not be all that technically savvy and WMP comes with XP - I'd like to prevent having to ask the users to download another player if preferable. I don't have very much experience with WMP 9 or WMP 10 etc. Forgive me if this is a silly question, but can they stream from mp3 audio streams? If so then I wouldn't have to worry about steaming WMA format at all. -- Michael Hale <smiley@gift-culture.org> gift culture: http://www.gift-culture.org initstring: http://www.initstring.org artificial music machine: http://www.artificialmusicmachine.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/icecast/attachments/20050831/93f37b29/attachment.html