[Icecast-dev] Question about buffering with icecast protocol

[Geoff Shang]

Hi,

Shoutcast has, or at least used to have, a 1 mb buffer.  This means that it 
stores the last meg of the incoming stream and shoves it out to connecting 
clients.  This is annoying because you can't turn it off and you can't (or 
at least couldn't) change the size.  This meant about a 5-minute delay for 
16kbps streams which are not so common now but used to be very common 5 or 
6 years ago.

In Icecast, you can achieve this sort of behaviour with the various burst 
parameters.  The stock Icecast config has it set to burst 64k of data to 
connecting clients.  You can turn this off by setting the burst size to 0.

The burst size can also be set on a per mount basis I believe.

This raises a question I've been meaning to ask for awhile.  Is there any 
reason why we have both burst on connect and burst size?  Compatibility 
with older versions?  The burst size parameter would seem to be sufficient 
if setting it to 0 disables it.

Geoff.