Vorbis - Feb 2006 - Streaming vorbis support

Hi!

I'm setting up a streaming audio server for the student radio here in 
Stockholm.
I'm of course going to primarily use Ogg/Vorbis, but I'd like to know 
how well
Ogg/Vorbis streaming is supported on different platforms. I know it works
well Windows (for example w/ recent Winamps) and Unices (XMMS, ogg123 etc.)
but I'm not so sure about other platforms, most importantly Mac-OS X.

I need to know this mainly so I can decide on whether to support mp3 as 
well,
or if I can go Vorbis all the way. I'm deciding between using ices and 
darkice
for source - will be using icecast2. Ices seems generally cleaner and 
supports
some stuff I'll probably need (stereo->mono conversion for vorbis 
output), and
some that might be wanted (some nifty meta data handling), but only 
supports vorbis.
Darkice supports both Vorbis and MP3 (as well as some other formats) but 
doesn't
do stereo->mono conversion for Vorbis, and needs to be tweaked a bit to 
support
aoTuV quality -2, which makes maintanance/upgrading needlessly bothersome.

Any help on the issue is greatly appreciated. Other comments are also 
welcome.

Regards
Oscar

On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 09:14:31PM +0100, Oscar Sundbom wrote:
> I'm setting up a streaming audio server for the student radio here in 
> Stockholm.
Yay! We're always happy to seen new sites going up using free Codecs.
> Ogg/Vorbis streaming is supported on different platforms. I know it works
> well Windows (for example w/ recent Winamps) and Unices (XMMS, ogg123 etc.)
> but I'm not so sure about other platforms, most importantly Mac-OS X.
Unfortunately streaming support isn't great on MacOS X. It works fine in 
free players (the equivalents of what you've mentioned for windows and 
*nix) but while we do have quicktime plugins which play static files 
fine, iTunes (Apple's dominant music player on the platform) will not 
use them to play streams. iTunes seems to use custom internal code to 
support what streams it will play and Apple does not support and free 
codecs.

So, if you're willing to make people download a 3rd party player, you're
fine, but it won't play in what people are used to using. mp3 streams do
play in iTunes, at least the last time I tried.

If you do want to go vorbis-only, you might look at cortado, the java 
player from fluendo. It's mostly been used for playing streaming 
theora+vorbis video in webpages, but it could be used just to playback 
an audio stream. Java is well supported on MacOS X.

  http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/

For radio it should really be hacked up to show a little radio interface 
(play/pause and current track metadata) but it can be used as is.

HTH,
 -r