[Icecast] a few more questions...

[Karl Heyes]

On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 19:27, Michael Hale wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I sent the last email prematurely - I had a few more questions.  I

icecast can bind to specific IPs if required or else it listens on all
interfaces. As for limits on a Gig-e card, the listener number will
depend on the stream bitrate, but there are no internal application
limits AFAICT except for those you impose via the xml.

> don't wish to start a holy war here, but are there certain OSs /
> Distros that are preferred for running very busy icecast servers? 
> We're a Solaris shop currently, but don't mind using linux or BSD if
> that would make things easier.

The code is made to be as compatible as it can be, but many people are
running icecast on linux-based systems. We don't (deliberately at least)
build for 1 system or another but it does depend on what we have access
to. The problem with building pre-built packages is knowing what people
have eg do they have theora or curl etc, some are fairly common so don't
tend to be a problem.

> I see there is a Fedora Core RPM on the icecast page - does that
> indicate that Redhad would be a preferred distro to use?

we prefer to send out tar files (source code) because trying to organise
prebuilt packages is hard but we certainly don't mind having people
submit pre-built builds to us.

...
> Also, can icecast relay WMA9?  We decided to go with the Spacial Audio
> SOS product to deal with AFTRA requirements, and it supports encoding
> to mp3, mp3pro, WMA9, and OGG - is it much of a headache to have an
> icecast server be able to relay mp3 and WMA9 streams at the same time?

We handle any number of streams but for each one we either process Ogg
(we are a xiph project after all) or passthrough others like mp3/aac/nsv
etc. I don't know the format of WMA to comment on it specifically, if it
requires special handling for streaming then icecast won't handle it. 

karl.