[Icecast] pre-roll ads and log file

[Philipp Schafft]

Good afternoon,

On Fri, 2018-06-15 at 10:20 +0200, StreamAnalyst wrote:
> Are pre-roll ads supported by Icecast? If so, how?

You can specify a into file. It is send to the listener before the
listener is attached to the actual stream.


> And will the log file tell me if the pre-roll ad was completely
> listened to?

> Say the pre-roll ad lasts 15 seconds. If I see a connection of 15
> seconds in the log file, does it mean that the listener stopped
> listening immediately after the ad or that he listened to the ad and
> then to 15 seconds of music?

The log reports the connection time in wall clock seconds. It does not
report the playback time (Icecast has for multiple reasons no idea about
the playback time).

For long running connections those are about the same. However for short
connections they aren't. The reason for that the listener client
prebuffers some amount of data before playback starts. Icecast has no
control over this. Also Icecast sends a so called burst by default. That
burst helps the client to fill the the buffer quickly.

In an ideal world the two cancel out each other. However as Icecast has
no control over the listener nor does know it's parameters there is a
difference.

There is also some more noise like network latency and jitter.

Generally speaking I would guess that abs(error) < 20s for virtually all
sane setups.


> And if a player disconnects because of a poor network and
> automatically reconnects, will the pre-roll ad be sent again?

Yes. This is because Icecast is fully stateless. To Icecast all
connections are independent.

With best regards,

-- 
Philipp Schafft (CEO/Geschäftsführer) 
Telephon: +49.3535 490 17 92

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