[Vorbis] Help please streaming oggs as they are being created

[ben-extra at MIT.EDU]

Hi all,

I often record radio shows for posterity, and sometimes I have friends
who would like to listen to them live over the net.  When I am
recording for my own purposes, I use a command of the form: "brec |
oggenc", (options omitted for clarity) and I send the output to a
file, call it radio.ogg.

Locally, I use Debian stable.  If I want to listen to the show as I
record it, I can use xmms, the command "xmms radio.ogg" does the
trick.  xmms pops up with the current length of the recording - if it
is 20 minutes into the show, xmms reports a file length of 20 minutes.
If I want, I can "seek" into the file, by dragging a control, which
takes me into the file.  When I reach the 20 minute mark, the file
continues playing, even though the file length continues to be
indicated as 20 minutes.

I would like to set things up so someone listening to the same file
over the web can get the same results.  On a Linux machine, this would
probably be using xmms, on a Windows machine it seems WinAmp is one
common player.  I am new to both Apache and html.  I have tried to
google on this, and specifically google the xiph.org archives.  I have
tried three ways: linking to the file like any other in Apache, via
the mod_mp3 module for Apache, and via a python script web-server
called Edna.

Nothing does what I want.  Edna was easy to set up and use.  When I go
to my own edna web page, xmms opens and streams radio.ogg just fine,
but there is no seek control displayed, so I can't move forward in the
file to the current time.  However, the file does play through to the
end.  So if I start listening 20 minutes after a recording starts, I
can listen to the whole recording, but 20 minutes delayed.  I haven't
tested edna from Windows.

Using straight Apache, the entire file downloads before it starts to
play (no streaming) and there IS a seek control, so I can move forward
to the current time.  Which is good, except xmms stops playing when it
reaches the end of the file, even if the file has gotten larger on the
server.  (So if I start listening 20 minutes into the recording, I can
only hear 20 minutes of the recording.)  I have either not gotten
mod_mp3 to work properly, or it exhibits the same behavior.

Reading google and the xiph.org archives there seems to be a lot of
ideas on how to make this work, but nothing definitive.  Things I have
seen mentioned include:

  -using ices/icecast
  -setting the content-length field to 0
  -omitting the content-length field
  -changing the Cache-Control field
  -changing the Expires field
  -changing the Content-Type field
  -changing to MP3, which is better suited to seeking

All of the above I am sure I *could* do.  But I have little experience
with the needed tools.  I also can not easily test windows apps, as I
don't have access to a windows machine without special arrangements.
I am hoping people on this list might have definitive experience with
what works, and / or what does not work.  This would save me a lot of
time trying things in a somewhat random order.

Thank you,

-Ben Blout