[Icecast] Some ideas

[Geoff Shang]

Hi:

I'll start out by saying that I'm just a humble user, though a user who has 
kept an eye on Icecast and related development for about 5 years now.

To start with, Icecast is just one of the projects of the Xiph.org 
Foundation (http://www.xiph.org).  So while some of the things you mention 
are not in place for Icecast specifically, they are in place or at least on 
the drawing boardfor Xiph generally.

Some might disagree with me, but I find that Xiph is pretty open about what 
it's up to and what still needs to be done.  Apart from the various mailing 
lists, there is the xiph.org wiki (http://wiki.xiph.org), which includes 
details of and transcripts of their monthly meetings which are a good way 
to keep across the various projects.

For Icecast specifically, the icecast-dev list is a good place to look. 
There's also the ToDo file in the Icecast source tree, and the xiph 
bugtracker at trac.xiph.org (nice looking tracker BTW, much less 
intimidating than the one you guys had before).

The bounty thing has already been thought of, and an attempt to start one 
up has already begun.  See http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Bounties .  I 
note that there's no Icecast specific bounties in there yet, but some 
existing bounties would benefit Icecast (particularly bitrate peeling in 
Ogg Vorbis).

I agree that documentation for Icecast in multiple languages would be nice. 
But I was looking at the docs today and I personally think they need a bit 
of work in English first before we go translating them into other 
languages.  I didn't see anything regarding recent features of Icecast in 
the docs I read, and there's been a typo in the ReadMe for as long as I can 
remember.

As for the website, the Xiph websites in general have a team of people 
working on them following a call for help that went out a few months ago. 
Judging by the commits I see, they seem to be doing good work.  Not sure 
who to contact to offer help but I'm sure someone on here will know.

Not sure if any of this info is helpful, hopefully it is.

Geoff.


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Geoff Shang <geoff at hitsandpieces.net>
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