[Icecast-dev] iPhone patches question

[Christopher Zenzel]

Hi Bob,

I am thinking that metadata could be streamed to the iPhone with some additonal work. There are some possible methods including wrapping a custom interface (either a Web App or iPhone SDK App) to check with a server script to grab metadata and display it as its streaming the Icecast MP3 Format.

For example:

There would be two domains such as icecast.server and metadata.server on the Internet. The icecast.server runs the latest Icecast release version with the iPhone patches. The metadata.server would run a script that can check for metadata either from a database or the Icecast server to display in a XML format.

Then a display page such as web.server/display.php/htm would contact the metadata server and display its information and have an embeeded CoreMedia or Quicktime Player to play the stream from the actual icecast server.

With the use of AJAX or automated checking in the page, you could check the metadata server's script every 3-25 seconds to return XML to be displayed such as:

<metadata><title>Stream Title</title><song>A Song</song><artist>An Artist</artist></metadata>

and display it with the XMLHTTPRequest object that both the iPhone and Desktop Safari provides...

The built in Safari and Quicktime Player may be limited by certain things to prevent it from showing metadata on screen. The goals of the patches that I posted allow direct streaming on the iPhone without any additonal applications. You would need to point the browser or quicktime player directly to the stream (icecast.server/stream.mp3).

There are some players such as WunderRadio on the App Store that allow custom URLs and support metadata without modification of the Icecast or Windows Media servers to support the iPhone. The WunderRadio app costs about 5-6 dollars.

Thanks,
Christopher Zenzel