[Icecast] Speex (source) client?

Thu Nov 17 00:12:41 UTC 2005

actually, that's not entirely true...

Winamp actually doesn't do anything with extensions when choosing an input 
plugin, when winamp plays a file or stream it passes it along to each of 
it's configured input plugins.  Each input plugin is fed the filename and 
is responsible for telling winamp that it can or cannot handle that 
file.  The first one that answer's "yes" is set as the input plugin for 
that type.  The obvious problem here is that the plugin doesn't actually 
have any access to the content of the file/stream, it's just fed the 
"filename".  I suppose it could (in the case of a stream) connect to the 
URL passed to it, and look for just the content type and decide based off 
that, it would then need to disconnect from the stream after it's made it's 
choice, and then connect again if it was, in fact, able to read that 
stream.  I think the correct solution is to create a "in_ogg" input plugin 
that either has vorbis/speex/flac decoding login built-in, or supports it's 
own set of plugins for decoding the possible codecs embedded within the ogg 
framework.

creating new extensions for handling ogg speex/vorbis/flac is completely 
against the whole concept of *having* a standard container format.

oddsock

At 05:36 PM 11/16/2005, Ross Levis wrote:
>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.
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Icecast mailing list
>Icecast at xiph.org
>http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/icecast
>
>_______________________________________________
>Icecast mailing list
>Icecast at xiph.org
>http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/icecast