[icecast] Too many "too many errors"

[Jack Moffitt]

> > Hmm. I tried a windows laptop box (kinda slow) and indeed after about
> > 30-40 minutes playback starts stuttering and eventually disconnects
> > from the icecast server.
> > 
> > Nothing else is running on this box. What gives? Why am I losing about 
> > 25% of the connections to this error?
> 
> Are you using shout?

Let me clarify here with the answer I've given everyone for almost a
year now.

This error is almost never a bug.  It generally means exactly what it
says.  Your client can't receive data fast enough.  It sometimes means
the opposite, your client can't handle data this fast.

Player have limited buffers.  When they get full, they can't store more
data.  They stop requesting it.  Icecast notices they it can't send
anymore data, and drops the connection after a period of time.

The normal cause is a slow client won't be getting data fast enough.
Icecast does the same thing.

Now normally you'd think this is the fault of bandwidth.  That has
something to do with it.

In icecast the datarate of the stream is controlled by the source
client.  If it sends data too slow, clients won't get enough data, and
things will sound weird.  If it sends data too fast, it will fill up the
buffer and missing audio will result.

So the two causes are "not enough bandwidth" or "source client has bad
timing".

Shout has bad timing.  That's why I completely rewrote the streaming
core in libshout and made the timing pretty damn solid.  Ices shouldn't
exhibit these problems.  Other source clients based on libshout
shouldn't exhibit these problems.

Liveice doesn't have this problem either, unless your having trouble
with encoding too slow.

Shoutcast DSP never has this problem for the same reason as liveice.  it
encodes everything on the fly in realtime, and so there's no need for
timing at all.

jack.

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