[icecast] A large streaming project

[Michael Smith]

Ross Levis <ross at stationplaylist.com> said:

> Hi
> 
> I've just become involved in a company that is starting a new large 
> project which involves streaming thousands of Internet radio stations, 
> possibly up to 8000.  They were heading towards the Windows Media format 
> but I mentioned Ogg Vorbis streaming and they are interested.  This will 
> be a major boost to Ogg Vorbis in the market place if they decide to do it.

That sounds really great.

> 
> I'm not exactly sure how streaming works as I've not ever been involved 
> in it.  I presume from what I've read that audio is encoded to Ogg 
> Vorbis format at the desired bit rate on a PC (Windows or Linux) which 
> then sends the encoded data to an IceCast server which makes it 
> available on the Internet.  Is this basically it?  If a hosting company 
> is providing the Internet bandwidth then I presume the hosting company 
> will need IceCast running on many of their servers, and we will be 
> streaming the encoded Vorbis data to their servers.  Does this sound right?
> 
> I just need to get the concept right before I let them know.  Some other 
> questions.

This is all accurate.

> 
> Is IceCast ready for a project like this?

I think so, but I haven't done any testing on quite this scale. Presumably
this would be distributed over many servers anyway (I don't think icecast2
right now would cope well with 8000 seperate streams - though on a reasonably
fast server it should be ok with 8000 clients (I've only tested up to 3000
personally).

The only major thing is this: do they require RTP (multicast)? If they do (and
they may well not), then right now, icecast2 isn't an option (since we don't
do RTP).

> Can IceCast run on Windows?  Probably not required but just interested.
> If the hosting company isn't interested in compiling etc, would someone 
> on this list be willing to create binaries that can be easily installed 
> on a Linux server?  I guess it depends on the Linux distro.

Yes, it does run on windows. Compiling packages for linux would be fine (I run
debian, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who wouldn't mind compiling it
on most other distributions).

Mike

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