[Icecast] mp3 vs ogg question (reformatted)

[Brendan Cully]

On Tuesday, 21 September 2004 at 17:16, Jason wrote:
> oops the last was in HTML and I know alot of you won't answer html email
> 
> How come the song data shows up faster with ogg when with mp3.
> 
> I ask this because the people who are using icecast to stream police 
> scanners also made a system to send realtime updates to what channel people 
> are listening to. With Ogg the title shows up about .5 of a second before 
> the talking starts but with mp3 it's about 1-2 seconds after the talking 
> starts.
> 
> Is there anyway to speed up the text on mp3 or are we just stuck with it?

This is likely to be the result of the metadata interval setting. I
believe by default icecast will send metadata updates every 8 or 16k,
regardless of the bit rate. It sounds like you're probably using a
very low bit rate, which means 8k could be a couple of seconds.

I don't have the icecast source here, but if it's not already a config
option, it shouldn't be too hard to lower the value in the
source. Since metadata only costs a single byte every interval when
there's been no change, it shouldn't have any noticeable impact on
your stream, even if you lower it to 1 or 2k.