[vorbis] streaming ogg audio

[Moritz Grimm]

figyu wrote:
> all this happens and refers to when listening to streaming files in winamp
> 2.80 full version.
> 
> so i find i can seek into streaming mp3s, file length and time position
> appears to be correct and correctly shown, while in streaming ogg, file
> length is stated as 0,1s constantly (or something like that), and the time
> position is not shown. also, and this is my problem, i cannot seek into
> streaming ogg neither back nor forward.

Mkay. The only possible scenario where this could be working would be an
mp3 lying on a standard webserver that supports resuming downloads. You
don't really listen to an mp3 stream, but play an mp3 file simply off an
http server instead of your local harddisk. This might work if the mp3
plugin of Winamp supports this ... would be a nice idea. On the other
hand, I really doubt that this will work well with VBR mp3s, so Vorbis
(being a VBR only codec) might get into trouble here.

MP3 streams in the traditional sense are not seekable, you play what you
get from the server. Restarting such a "real" stream will let you play
only the current position of the stream, so it's like tuning into a
radio station (that's why it's called Internet radio ;P).

Now, that kinda on-demand "streaming" (or rather downloading) of .ogg or
.mp3 files off a webserver ... that's not what one could call streaming,
IMHO. With CBR mp3 files this might be possible, which is why the winamp
mp3 plugin supports it supposedly, but VBR will create bad problems. I
doubt this is possible with Vorbis without support on the server side.

One idea would be to let the [Icecast2] server send the client the total
length of the stream when possible (that's when it's doing on-demand
streaming of single .ogg files) and react to client requests like "now
jump to position 'xx:xx mins' and stream from there". This would be a
nice feature request, and maybe it's even possible to do? In any case,
this would take quite a while to be implemented. Icecast2 doesn't have
many features yet and Vorbis developement has a higher priority.

<p>Moritz

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