[icecast] Icecast, Liveice... experiences?

[Chris Riddell]

On Thursday 28 February 2002 06:20 pm, you wrote:
> Hello.
>
>  We have been using LiveIce to serve mp3 streams for 10 months or so. So
> far, IceCast has been pretty reliable. Well, until LiveIce is introduced
> into the picture. We originally tried LiveIce running on FreeBSD. It ran
> for a while, but we suffered wierd problems: disconnects, skips and
> such. We are streaming from a radio receiver -- at 28800 compatible
> bitrates.
>
>  So we switched to the WinAmp plugin from the Shoutcast site. We easily
> manage 2 month uptimes without problems. However... It is a Windows
> program, and Unix is our friend.
>
>  So recently I've decided to expand. That is, add some other audio
> streams. I scrapped together 3 systems to act as encoding hosts. Loaded
> FreeeBSD 4.5 + current Lame + LiveIce + Screen on them all. Perfect I
> think! Small footprint, I can line them up with a network switch in the
> corner of my bedroom and serve content.
>
>  But now it is making IceCast unstable. I first hit problems when
> decreasing the bitrate to 16000 and the sample rate to 11025. I tried to
> move things back up, but it seems to be completley unstable and a mess.
>
>  Does anyone have suggestions? By leaving LAME and trying to go with L3ENC
> or whatever the current version is -- will that improve stability? Anyone
> have any tips? I really don't want to go the Windows route -- but I don't
> want to babysit the stuff either. LiveIce seems like an okay application
> -- except stability. Is there anything else to feed live audio outside of
> LiveIce?

I've been streaming live audio and not had much luck with LiveIce staying 
alive either...  I had a silly cron script running to check if it was alive 
and bring it back up again!

I switched to Darkice about 2 months ago and the stream has been rock solid.  
This on a linux box running 2.4.14 kernel.  Darkice uses liblame without 
spawning lame externally and, in my opinion, is much more straight forward in 
it's configuration.  Check it out: http://darkice.sourceforge.net

BTW, ignore the warning about it being beta. While that may be true, it seems 
very stable and, for what I want, bug-free.

Chris

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
icecast project homepage: http://www.icecast.org/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'icecast-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.