[Vorbis] Streaming vorbis support

[Ralph Giles]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 09:14:31PM +0100, Oscar Sundbom wrote:

> I'm setting up a streaming audio server for the student radio here in 
> Stockholm.

Yay! We're always happy to seen new sites going up using free Codecs.

> Ogg/Vorbis streaming is supported on different platforms. I know it works
> well Windows (for example w/ recent Winamps) and Unices (XMMS, ogg123 etc.)
> but I'm not so sure about other platforms, most importantly Mac-OS X.

Unfortunately streaming support isn't great on MacOS X. It works fine in 
free players (the equivalents of what you've mentioned for windows and 
*nix) but while we do have quicktime plugins which play static files 
fine, iTunes (Apple's dominant music player on the platform) will not 
use them to play streams. iTunes seems to use custom internal code to 
support what streams it will play and Apple does not support and free 
codecs.

So, if you're willing to make people download a 3rd party player, you're 
fine, but it won't play in what people are used to using. mp3 streams do
play in iTunes, at least the last time I tried.

If you do want to go vorbis-only, you might look at cortado, the java 
player from fluendo. It's mostly been used for playing streaming 
theora+vorbis video in webpages, but it could be used just to playback 
an audio stream. Java is well supported on MacOS X.

  http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/

For radio it should really be hacked up to show a little radio interface 
(play/pause and current track metadata) but it can be used as is.

HTH,
 -r