[Icecast] Shoutcast compatibility suggestions

[Geoff Shang]

Hi:

Ok, I've not managed to find any documentation on the shoutcast 
compatibility introduced in icecast 2.2.0, so please humour me if I 
missunderstand how it's meant to work.

This is my understanding of it currently:

1.  You configure Icecast (as shown in the shoutcast example) so that 
shoutcast connections get mapped to the mountpoint you define.

2.  You configure a listen socket specifically for use as a shoutcast 
source port.  People connecting on this port wil have their stream appear 
on regular Icecast ports under the mountpoint defined for Shoutcast 
streams.

Note that it's not clear whether you can only have one port defined, or 
just that you can only have one of such ports active at any one time.

3.  So, you end up with a situation where you have a regular Icecast setup
    running on your regular Icecast port(s), plus one (or possibly more)
    ports set up specifically to receive shoutcast-style connections which
    will appear on the regular Icecast port(s) under the mountpoint
    specified for such streams.

Assuming I'm correct so far, my observations follow.

The one downside to this setup is that you can only accept one shoutcast 
style connection at a time.  This means that if you have people who want or 
need to use this type of connection, you need to run multiple servers. 
This seems kinda silly to me as Icecast is otherwise designed to handle as 
many streams as you can manage.

My proposal is this.  Move the mountpoint specifier from where it is now 
into the section where you configure the shoutcast source port.  This way, 
you could configure several shoutcast source ports, each with their own 
mountpoint and hence served by the one server.  Ideally, it would also be 
good if you could define separate source passwords for such ports too, but 
I don't know how much work that would be.

I do realise that we aren't really in the business of encouraging the use 
of shoutcast sources, but at least such a change would encourage the use of 
the Icecast server as it would negate the need to run multiple servers. 
Currently I work with a project that runs 6 shoutcast-compatible servers as 
well as an Icecast server.  I'd dearly love to be able to get rid of most 
of these.  If I can do it without having to bug any of the broadcasters 
into changing their software, then it'll go a lot more smoothly.

Geoff.


-- 
Geoff Shang <geoff at hitsandpieces.net>
Phone: +61-418-96-5590
MSN: geoff at acbradio.org

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