[Icecast] Low-bitrate audio encode/stream application

[david feldman]

Thanks Ralph,

speex is also interesting, and it will be for speech content, however, the 
listener side will be limited to generic CODEC (I don't want to port 
software to the CE machine, but rather use the existing older audio 
decoder(s) present there).

Anyway, this is good info, and I'll do some further reading.

Dave

>From: Ralph Giles <giles at xiph.org>
>To: david feldman <wb0gaz at hotmail.com>
>CC: icecast at xiph.org
>Subject: Re: [Icecast] Low-bitrate audio encode/stream application
>Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 13:51:28 -0800
>
>On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 02:28:18PM -0700, david feldman wrote:
>
> > I am totally new to icecast, and would appreciate a pointer in the right
> > direction. My application is to encode audio (at the linux server) at a 
>low
> > bit rate, say ~16 kbps, for transmission to a decoder at another 
>location.
> > The audio source will be bandlimited (basically voice grade circuit such 
>as
> > you'd find in a telephone application.) The decoder end (connected via a
> > TCP/IP session) would be a Windows CE 3.0 machine which may be limited 
>to
> > MP3 decode format.
>
> > I've looked through what documentation I could find on
> > icecast and haven't seen anything that tells me how to characterize the
> > audio encoding rules (how do you pick 16 kbps, 32 kbps, etc., stereo, 
>mono,
> > etc.?) Anyway, a pointer to the correct documentation resource would be
> > greatly appreciated.
>
>There are actually two pieces to this. Icecast itself is a server. It
>reflects streams from so-called 'source clients' to listening clients.
>It's in the source client that you set the encoding parameters. Ices is
>probably the best thing to use on linux, but there are others. See
>http://icecast.org/ices.php and http://icecast.org/3rdparty.php for
>links and associated howtos.
>
>BTW, if you're actually doing voice over your very-low-bandwidth
>connection, you might consider our speex codec. It's designed
>specifically for speech and will in general do a much better job than
>vorbis or mp3 below 32 kbps. http://speex.org/
>
>HTH,
>  -r