[Icecast] Icecast + theora stream + Firefox 3.1a2 = promising

[Thomas B. Ruecker]

Hi folks,

just wanted to let you in on my research into use of theora streams in 
<video> tags.
The current alpha 2 of Firefox 3.1 supports <video> tags [1] and ogg 
encapsulated theora + vorbis .
Static files delivered by a webserver work just fine if they come in 
fast enough.

But of course my interest is not in static files but in streams. So I 
hacked together a small html-test file[2] that references some random 
stream from our yp[3]. It took some experimenting, but eventually it works.
If you want to test this for your stream just steal my html source. ;-)

Of course there are still some issues left. Stream playback will stutter 
and stop a lot - this is due to a suboptimal caching strategy [4]. But 
Chris says it will be addressed within an refactoring[5].
Also it will fail on chained ogg streams[6]. This is an limitation of 
the used liboggplay[7] library. Let's hope this library gets updated 
soon, because it seems like right now there is no one maintaining it[8].
Also the stream will only play if the controls attribute is set[9].

If you discover another issue either let me know (by email or on irc 
#icecast) or directly open an bug in the mozilla bugzilla for "core" 
"video/audio".

But so far I think this looks very promising. Playback of audio and 
video streams without any plug-ins!

Cheers

Thomas

1) Developer info on Firefox 3.1 - 
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Firefox_3.1_for_developers#HTML_changes
2) One of my basic test files - 
http://www.ruecker-itk.de/icecast/firefox/theorastreamtest.html
3) Xiph's icecast streams YP - http://dir.xiph.org
4) Bug 455174 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455174
5) Bug 449159 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449159
6) Bug 455165 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455165
7) liboggplay website - http://annodex.net/software/liboggplay/index.html
8) Seeking a maintainer for liboggplay - 
http://blog.gingertech.net/2008/08/06/seeking-a-maintainer-for-liboggplay/
9) Bug 455167 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455167