[icecast] Legality Issue & Relaying

[Leo Currie]

Michael Hobbs wrote:

> Legality:
> Further to the last couple of posts regarding legality issue. I notice
> that the PRC do their licence cost on a percentage of your revenue,
> seeing as I plan to host no adverts or indeed any commercial aspect I
> hope to get a licence without actually paying anything. (I've sent
> them an inoccous email so we'll see what they say)

Do you mean PRS? I suspect there is a minimum fee - it'd be unlikely to 
get anything for free from these people.

> Relaying:
> Unless you get a business connection in the UK standard upload is
> generally 256Kbps regardless of your download rate (hence the

(although better rates are on the way... http://www.ukonline.net/8000/ )

> Asynchronous bit in ADSL). I plan to use my brother's and parents
> internet connections at their respective houses as relays for the
> stream to enable more bandwidth for my listeners to enjoy a smoother
> stream. A question regarding this, can you use a single address (i.e
> as a link on a webpage) to balance the load between the various
> realys, or would you have to have separate addresses (similar to
> http/ftp mirrors)?

A quick and easy way of doing this is to add several entries to a 
playlist file. When one server is full, the player will just try the 
next one.
e.g. for Winamp:  http://www.radiofg.com/live/shoutcastFG.pls
- although the mime type in this example is wrong :(

You could also use a script to generate a single entry playlist, with 
some kind of round robin algorithm. You could even have the script query 
the servers to find out which one is least full.

Leo