[Icecast] Stream fallbacks/spillovers/splashing

[Geoff Shang]

Dan Regalia wrote:

> My assumption is that the Fallback-override should only pertain to the
> mountpoint in which it is contained, and not the entire server.


You have found what I consider to be a bug in Icecast, though there seems 
to be no willingness to fix this.

If you have a stream which is a fallback for more than one source, any 
listener which fell back to it will be pulled forward to any source for 
which the stream was a fallback.

Example: You have two streams, /stream1.ogg and /stream2.ogg, and a 
fallback called /fallback.ogg.  If you have listeners to both /stream1.ogg 
and /stream2.ogg and both streams stop, all listeners will fall back 
to/fallback.ogg.  Then, if say /stream1.ogg reconects, all listeners will 
be moved to /stream1.ogg, regardless of whether they originally tuned in to 
/stream1.ogg or /stream2.ogg.  More confusing, if a person who originally 
tuned into /stream2.ogg, who is now on /stream1.ogg, stops their player and 
starts it again, they'll drop back through to /fallback.ogg.

I filed this as a bug in April last year 
(http://trac.xiph.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/ticket/642).  I even suggested how 
this might be fixed.  You'll notice the ticket has been closed.  Whilst 
it's possible to work around the bug, it's clunky in my opinion and Icecast 
doesn't act in a way a reasonable person would expect it to in this 
situation.

If you would like to work around this bug, take a look at Karl's 
explanation of how to do this using local relays: 
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/icecast/2005-September/009947.html

Geoff.