[Icecast] limit-rate

[Paul Martin]

On Sun, Nov 04, 2018 at 11:54:16AM +0000, Thomas B. Rücker wrote:

> That's not a version.
> That's completely different software at this point.
> It's also not Xiph.org, but published by Karl.

It is a desirable feature, though.

The use case is a server with one or more external feeds, where those
feeds can be intermittent.  You want a fallback-mount to a static file
for when the feed drops, but you also want the listeners to go back to
the live feed soon after it returns.

Unfortunately, the way Icecast2 works with static files is that it
feeds as much as the listener's player software buffer can take,
meaning a huge spike in bandwidth use when it falls back to a static
file, and (more importantly) a huge lag in returning to the correct
feed when that reconnects.

The way I'm working round this at the moment is to have an instance of
liquidsoap on the same server as Icecast, encoding a single static
file as a set of continually running fallback-mount feeds, with the
same encoder settings as the feeds they're guarding.  This is wasteful
in resources (memory and CPU) for what could be pre-encoded static
files if Icecast had some sort of rate limitation on feeding out
static files.

-- 
Paul Martin <pm at nowster.me.uk>