[vorbis] Hacking up streaming - we want to

[Ciaran Anscomb]

Hi,

We would like to stream some of our content as OGG Vorbis.

We've currently managed to hack liveice and icecast to stream over HTTP
and play that with ogg123.  But from reading the dev list, I see that's
also been done here, probably in a more elegant way - can anyone point
me at the right place to see the current state of this?

For now we'll probably just be doing this internally for testing, but
in future we want to stream proper.  We're definitely interested in
actually doing this as soon as possible, although we probably won't
advertise it until end-user playback is a bit more smooth (our audience
is quite large, and an extremely high proportion are non-technical) and
of course all streaming issues with the format are worked out (I'll list
those later just in case you're not tired of running the list through
your head :).

Another main reason for this mail:

Looking through the dev list, I see no current work on plugins for
RealPlayer or Windows Media Player.  Unfortunately, this would be
pretty much essential before we could properly announce, as they're the
only things we can rely on users having.  Both have a plugin
architecture, and both can apparantly be told (with SMIL for RealPlayer
and asx for WMP) where to get a plugin for a new format.

Is anyone working on either of these, or would anyone like to?  When we
have a few more resource, we will probably look at this ourselves, but
for now we're pretty loaded down with other projects.  If anyone has
looked at this I'd love to hear from them.

Streaming requirements & more questions:
* CBR - I know this is coming...
* Low bitrates - also coming, but is it trivial to generate codebooks
  for 32/16Kbps?  Maybe even as low as 8 - would be interesting to hear
  if taking it that low competes with Real codecs.
* Multiple bitrates (would be nice) - I imagine this is something that would
  have to be hacked into icecast.  ISTR reading somewhere that taking
  high bitrate vorbis and outputting low was easy because of the
  format, but that might have been /. mutterings.  What's the real
  story?

Those aside, I'd love to get even 64Kbps VBR Vorbis streaming Radio 1 to
the world even if it were only people on this list that knew about it while
it was being developed.

Hope someone can offer insight, especially on the icecast & plugins fronts,

Thanks,

..ciaran

-- 
Ciaran Anscomb <ciarana at rd.bbc.co.uk>
BBC Internet Services, Kingswood Warren.  x39515

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