[Icecast] overlaying prerecorded content over a live stream...

[oddsock]

At 02:12 PM 8/22/2005, you wrote:
>Hello everyone!
>
>I've been looking into using icecast to help get some terrestrial radio 
>stations into Internet broadcasting.  One of their requirements is that 
>they have the ability to overlay internet-only content over the regional 
>commercials that they run during their programming - ie, during breaks 
>between their normal programming, they don't want ads from their 
>advertisers going out over the internet, but rather, they would prefer to 
>substitute special content.
>
>I could see doing this by having a fallback stream loop continuous 
>internet only content and switching over to the stream during commercial 
>breaks by terminating the main stream but that would seem not to be the 
>optimal solution due to a clash with how I planned to introduce redundancy 
>into the system (by having two machines onsite, each encoding the live 
>stream from the boards realtime and relaying to two geographically 
>distinct icecast servers, each set up as fallbacks for the other).
>
>Has anybody here had to deal with a similar problem and/or have 
>suggestions for the best way in which to proceed?

the only other way I could think this could be done would be to hook in at 
the source client level.  Your source client which is encoding from your 
live feed would need to be modified to either be signalled, or poll for an 
event that would be used to switch to your alternate content (which could 
either be local files or even a relay of a different stream).  You would 
then have another signal which would cause the source client to go back to 
the original feed.  Either way, this would require some modifications to an 
existing source client (or writing your own) as well as something to 
generate the "signals".  EZstream might be a good start as it can be fed a 
raw stream (via stdin) and is *relatively* simple, so modification wouldn't 
be too terrible... anyway, that's the way I'd do it.. :)

oddsock