[Icecast] How to improve stream quality with sources on jittery/high latency connections?

[Martin Hecko]

Hello all:

I am a novice in setting up Icecast servers. I wanted to understand if the community has guidance on how to improve stream quality when sources are on unreliable connections.

Specifically, I have a source that broadcasts on jittery cellular connection. The connection does have sufficient bandwidth, but does have high latency and jitter (that is sometimes the latency is high other times low and this changes in an unpredictable way). Unfortunatelly, I can’t use a different connection for the source.

The issues manifests with stream dropouts or occassionally with the stream “fast forwarding”. The same source on a high quality network connection doesn’t have theses issues, so I am fairly certain that that connection itself is the culprit.

I am willing to trade off stream latency for reliablity. That is, I would be happy to introduce say a minute (or more) of latency into the stream to compensate for the jittery connection. However, I am uncertain which paramteres to change in the configuration to accomplish this.

I am also open to other solutions for this problem or links to guides that people have written on how to deal with this.

The current source configuration is macOS with Audio Hijack for the broadcast. Running the latest Icecast on my own server.

Thank you for you input and guidance,

Martin