[Vorbis] icecast

[Ralph Giles]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2007 at 12:35:53PM -0400, Steve wrote:

> I would prefer to stream transparently for those who have an 
> appropriate player.  These clips range from 2 to 7 megs.  So trying to 
> put together what you and I have written, would you perhaps say that 
> Icecast would be desirable for my purposes and would probably be 
> fairly easy for me to set up, and that it would not require anything 
> but a compatible player for my visitors?

If you want to stream various static files on demand to your users, 
icecast still isn't necessary. You can request transparent hand-off
of the stream url to a player application by linking to a .m3u or
shoutcast playlist file. This is just a text file that contains the
actual file url. The browser will launch the player and give it the
playlist file; the player can then stream the file directly from
your webserver.

Icecast is useful when you have many listeners listening to the same
stream ("live" instead of "on-demand" streaming). The in the case of 
streaming from an actual live source, there's no way to do that with
a normal webserver, and in the cast of many concurrent listeners, 
optimizations are possible that let icecast scale much better than
a normal webserver would.

Hope that helps,
 -r