Dear I am too fresh, in this category. I want to build an internet radio station, that plays, mp3. after, installing icecast, with ezstream, I can listen, to my new radio station. but there is a problem, the bandwidth of my server was consumed, for each listener. for example, for only one listener, B.W=20KB/Sec, and for 5 listener, B.W=100KB/Sec. before it, I had another, idea about broadcasting. I thought, for 1 or 100 listener, a same B.W. will be consumed. tell me, I am right ? best Mani __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Hi, This is normal behaviour for Unicast streams. In this sense, Internet radio is not really broadcasting as such, as a stream needs to be sent to each individual listener. There are several solutions to this problem. 1. Software like Peercast (which I've not personally used) allows listeners to send the stream to each other. However, my understanding is that each listener has to be able to send the stream to someone else, so for it to work well, each listener needs to have 128kbps uplink available if you want a 128kbps stream to work well. My understanding is that this approach often doesn't work well in practice. 2. A variant on the peercast idea is Iceshare (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/IceShare) which is unicast streaming mixed with bit torrent. A great idea, but it appears no-one is currently working on it. 3. Multicast - the true solution. IP Multicasting will solve all of our problems, but it requires special handling and is (afaik) currently not supported in Icecast. So as far as I know, at present you need to be able to serve the full bitrate of your stream for each listener who tunes in. Geoff.