[Icecast] Furtherto my last post

[oddsock]

Michael Smith wrote:
> On 6/19/06, mike <mike-3 at bulldoghome.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> ANR is a international news station we were testing on icecast over the
>> weekend the quality great we chose mp3 because anyone can hear it. 
>> linux,
>> mac. or windblows. also wanted to use a linux server, which is far more
>> reliable than a windows machine ( always dropping out for some reason )
>> If the ogg only rule is permanent we will have to talk very nicely to 
>> our
>> system admin to switch to ogg with a option of mp3 though at this 
>> point we
>> cannot see a way forward and am pulling all ads from the playlist.
>> mike
>
> Icecast will continue to have working mp3 support, though we very
> strongly encourage use of free codecs such as ogg vorbis.
>
> The only thing that has been disabled is listing non-free formats on
> our stream directory. That's unlikely to be changed again in the
> forseeable future.
>
Mike seems to think that he speaks for the entire Icecast team.  I 
assure you that his feelings on the matter of the Stream Directory are 
certainly not shared by me.  There has been an issue raised regarding 
the efficiency of the Stream Directory and the load it imposed on some 
of the xiph resources.  As a side issue it has also been raised that 
publishing mp3 streams in the directory is not in line with what Xiph as 
an organization is trying to do.  Frankly, these two points are quite 
separate and really unrelated.  While I certainly believe in what Xiph 
is trying to do as an organization, I never saw Icecast as only a 
conduit for promoting Xiph.org projects and audio/video formats.  As 
such, I thought that adding support for additional streaming formats was 
in the best interest of the Icecast broadcasting community even though 
it may have conflicted with some of the Xiph.org principals.

The Xiph Stream Directory was designed, created, and developed primarily 
by me, and so I feel like I should have somewhat of a say in how it's 
used.  The only reason why I haven't really spoken up so far is due to 
my personal work commitments which have been preventing me from being 
able to spend any time on this.  Honestly, to fix the performance issues 
of the Stream Directory does not require a complete rewrite of it, and 
it really isn't "design flawed", it just needs a bit of work to make it 
more efficient.   Unfortunately, when I read comments like Mike's above, 
one would seem that there is no desire at all to bring back the non-ogg 
streams, regardless of what is done to make it more efficient.  I, for 
one, have no desire to spend a bunch of time making it more efficient to 
have the whole thing undermined by a simple "Oh, we decided that we 
really just don't want to list non-ogg streams anyway, regardless of how 
efficient or non-efficient it is..".  I suspect that Mike also does not 
speak for the entire Xiph organization, or maybe he does, I don't know.

Personally, I don't quite see the logic in the promotion of certain 
audio/video formats by the explicit restriction of any alternative 
formats on the Stream Directory.  I certainly understand the rational 
behind it, although I just don't think it's the right thing to do...

oddsock