[Icecast] Speex (source) client?

Wed Nov 16 23:36:30 UTC 2005

As you know, Winamp relies on the file extension to know what input
plugin to utilize for the audio decoding.  The input plugin for .ogg
files (in_vorbis.dll) needs to understand the other ogg container
formats but it doesn't as it is a vorbis only decoder.

So the only solution is for Ogg Speex to have a different extension so
this can be appended to the mountpoint, and an input plugin
understanding Ogg Speex will need to register that extension with
Winamp.  I'm not sure if one exists currently.

I believe Winamp supports longer than 3 character file extensions so
perhaps .oggspx and .oggflac could be used.

Ross.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "oddsock" <oddsock at oddsock.org>
To: <icecast at xiph.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 11:36 AM
Subject: Re: [Icecast] Speex (source) client?

oddcast currently doesn't do speex, or ogg-speex.   One of the biggest
problems currently with speex (and flac too) is client support.

I've just recently added ogg-flac support to oddcast (not yet available)
and in my testing found that client support for this format is
horrible.  On windows, Winamp and Foobar choke on it (most likely
assuming
that if it's ogg, it must be vorbis) and VLC also didn't understand it
(that could be a flac version issue).  The only client (unix or windows)
that I've found that works, are illi's filters for WMP
(http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/) which do ogg-flac streaming like a
champ.   When I switch to straight "flac", I get no client support  and
every client I can try doesn't seem to understand the stream.  Is this a
problem with the way I'm generating the stream ?  The way icecast is
relaying it ? who knows... really hard to tell without a known working
client.

so keep in mind that when you say "speex" you need to know if you are
talking about "ogg speex" (.ogg) or "speex" (.spx) and playing and
streaming each is different.  Same thing goes for "ogg flac" (.ogg) and
"flac" (.flac).  And unfortunately with most of these client support
(for
streaming) is very light if non-existant.

and to answer the question about libshout, libshout does not currently
support ogg-speex (or ogg flac) and this is due to the lack of the
timing
code.  When streaming from files (which is what libshout is quite often
used for), then you need to make sure libshout knows about the
underlying
format so it can throttle it at the appropriate bitrate, not doing so
will
call all sorts of turmoil on the icecast server side.

The good news is that as soon as it's added to libshout, ezstream can be
easily modified to support it (since ezstream is really just an example
usage of libshout).

oddsock
At 12:37 PM 11/16/2005, William K. Volkman wrote:
>Hello Dennis,
>On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 08:31, Dennis Heerema wrote:
> > An additional question for me is, could i send speex audio from a
> > live
> > source with an client like oddcast?
> >
> > Ment to be used for an talk radio programm.
> >
>
>I think you meant to send this to the icecast list.  I've not
>taken a look at the oddcast client yet due to the problems
>I've seen getting icecast to behave well with speex streams
>(see my post about 100% cpu consumption).  I've done more
>research and found that there are issues with the 1.1.10
>version of speexdec (encoding works fine).  I don't have
>much time to play with this during the week, perhaps this
>weekend I'll get to trying out oddcast.
>
>Cheers,
>William.
>
> > Regards,
> >
> > Dennis
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: "William K. Volkman" <wkvsf at users.sourceforge.net>
> > >
> > > OK, so a "don't be fooled by the SHOUT_FORMAT_VORBIS symbol"
> > > would have helped.   It appears that .spx files are .ogg files
> > > by another name.  Of course when I first tried it I was
> > > surprised that my 10Mb file kept reloading every second with
> > > both ezstream and oggfwd.  The 4Mb Theora test file was taking
> > > about 15 seconds (about 1/2 the duration of the video).
> > > After noticing that nothing was really reporting an error (and
> > > after hacking my own client to send, and having all the bytes
> > > reported sent)  I tried connecting via Windows Media Player
> > > and it worked, kinda (see below).
> > >
> > > I'm having difficulty in locating a linux client which can
> > > process the stream (RealPlayer/HelixPlayer report unknown
> > > codec).  It took a bit to find the xmms-speex plugin, xmms
> > > won't play the url however mplayer using the xmms-speex plugin
> > > will playback the .spx file.  However pointing mplayer
> > > at the icecast mount point results in a crash.  So far
> > > no luck. Any suggestion here would be appreciated.
> > >
> > > On Windows XP SP2 with the Direct Show drivers downloaded
> > > from:
> > > http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/oggcodecs_0.69.8924.exe
> > >
> > >
> > > Thanks for any hints.

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