[icecast] Q: Is it possible?

[Geoff Shang]

Hi:

If you have a card like an SB Live, you could have all the remote streams
playing and use something like alsamixer to set the volumes of these
sources relative to each other, and then feed the lot through one mixer
channel on your mixer.

You will hit two problems though.  The first is that you will need to have
a stream for remote participants to listen to.  Finding a way to send the
local host plus all other remote parties but not their own voice out to
them will be tricky.  If they can cope with hearing their own voice coming
back to them, or you can send them a mix where you can mute the remote feed
for them while they are talking, then perhaps you'll be OK.

The other problem you'll hit is latency.  Not sure how much of a problem
this will be, it all depends on how much buffering both the source and
client programs use.  If you're using MP3, you could use something like
mpg123 to play the remote streams, which uses very little buffering.  But
it's possible that the latency will be too big to be workable.  If you
could use speex with icecast or some other tool using speex for remotes,
then you'd be OK.

In fact, both these problems *could* be solved by using something like the
open H323 programs and using their conference server to connect everyone.
Pretty low latency and everyone would hear everyone else without hearing
themselves.  The only bummer about open H323 is that I don't know how to
get the sampling rate any higher than 11khz, which is not really good
enough for broadcasting (IMHO).

BTW: AFAIK, you can't use liveice with icecast2, you can use darkice
though.

Geoff.

--- >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.