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

HJ inzanekaoz at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 26 06:40:09 PDT 2004


I don't think that's an issue.

TCP/IP only works as fast as both recipient and sender can process it.  They
aren't asynchronous, so to speak.

Certainly, Apache serves up every file as fast as it's able, and so does the
TCP/IP stack in every operating system (humor me here).  But it would seem to
me that once a player's buffer is full of data, it would refuse any more
until it could process it.

This doesn't occur to me to be any different from a web browser.  The server
(any server) can only send as fast as the client will accept.

As example numbers ONLY, for illustraiton purposes;
If the Apache Daemon can pump out 100Mbps, but the server's upstream can only
output 20Kbps, Apache will "just deal with it" and upload at the server's
maximum upstream (where available).

If a client connects (say, a 5Kb/sec modem user) with a web browser, Apache
tries to send out at 100Mbps, the server upstream tries to send at 20Kbps,
but if the client only accepts at 5Kbps, everything stil works, because
TCP/IP is there to save the day and nobody gets flooded off the 'net.

Now... UDP might be a different issue.

As for running out of data at the end of the file; in this case, it would
think that the player would continually request data.  When EOF occurs, it
would just sit in the player's buffer, until the audio stream 'consumes' said
buffer.

Winamp has had a history of crying and stopping the stream as soon as it
stops receiving data, but I'm not sure if this is fixed, so that it plays to
end of buffer even if it stops receiving data for a length of time.  If this
is HTTP-based on-demand we're talking about, theoretically opening the stream
again to get a finalized HTTP: content-length (assuming that's how it's
working here) will allow seeking back up to that point and will continue to
buffer to the end.  I'm not sure VideoLAN has that issue (for the purposes of
this argument).

~

--- Geoff Shang <geoff at hitsandpieces.net> wrote:

> Hi:
> 
> The other problem you're going to have with Apache, assuming it can cope 
> with growing files, is the rate at which data is streamed.  Your player 
> will buffer just fine, but Apache will presumably push the data as fast as 
> its able.  This will probably be faster than the file's bitrate, so Apache 
> will run out of data to send when it catches up to the end of the file.
> 
> Geoff.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Geoff Shang <geoff at hitsandpieces.net>
> Phone: +61-418-96-5590
> MSN: geoff at acbradio.org
> 
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