Icecast Streaming Media Server

Liquid_Squelch · Joined: 11 Mar 2006 Posts: 56

I'm gearing up for a project, and I need to work the opposite of what everyone wants to do with Icecast.

I need a delay. Not a 30 second or 60 second delay, but a 15 minute or 30 minute delay. Normally, I could just increase the buffer to add a delay, but 15 minutes is a long time to wait Wink

About the best way I could come up with is:
1. Stream live to Icecast with a hidden and password protected mount.
2. wget the live stream via CRON each minute.
3. Save file in step 2 with <mount>_<date>_<hour-minute>.mp3|ogg

So the question is, can Icecast stream a playlist of say <mount>_"Now" - 15|30 Min.mp3|ogg ?

If so, how would I configure the Icecast mount point? Is the best approach a fallback mount as the .mp3|ogg of the delayed file? Would it be easier to have something like Ice2 or DarkIce stream the playlist? Should I look into LiquidSoap?

I'm looking to run all the scripting on the VPS with only a single originating "live" source which is remotely fed.

Long story short- is this at all possible? Am I living in a pipe dream?

Thanks!

karlH · Code Warrior Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 5476 Location: UK

A bit convoluted. you could set up an internal mountpoint with a very large queue and a burst which would be that of the 15 mins, then run curl on that mountpoint with a --limit-rate of the expected bitrate to feed into say ices via stdin. you would just need to make sure that the curl to ices link is not started for at least 15 mins while the queue is being filled.

At 128k, the burst would need to be around 14Meg, the curl --limit-rate would then prevent that being read at once, and ices or something similar would send to the delayed mountpoint. The on-connect script could be used to kick off a sleep followed by an curl/ices

karl.

Liquid_Squelch · Joined: 11 Mar 2006 Posts: 56

Thanks again for the info Karl.

If I follow correctly,
I will have example mount points /live and /delay

I know from my wget scripts that locally record my "/live" stream that each file is 3.5meg for a 30 minute file. So, for the rest of the exercise we'll assume 30 minute delay.

The buffer size on the /live mount point will be 3.5Meg

Icecast will be setup with an 'on connect' script that will curl the /live feed, then kick a ice0 session 30 minutes later.

We'll curl --limit-rate localhost/live to a file in the icecast web directory.. example: record.mp3

Then, runing ices0 (because I need mp3), I would setup the following in the config:

karlH · Code Warrior Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 5476 Location: UK

I did not refer to a file.

/live would have a large burst say 3.5meg, and curl would be started after 30mins after the stream starts. curl then feeds into say ices using a non re-encoding conf to feed into /delay eg

#!/bin/sh
(sleep 1800
curl -s --limit-rate 2048 http://.../live | ices -c delay.conf )

the exact rate may need to be checked but the key thing here is that the curl keeps a steady pace to feed ices which sends the older burst data into the second mountpoint. The curl|ices is kicked off from the on-connect or mount_add scripts.

karl.

Liquid_Squelch · Joined: 11 Mar 2006 Posts: 56

Karl,
Thank you again for all the help. I have one more question for the Code Warrior.

In the ices0 config file, there is a section for Playlist. Since I'm piping in a curl source, what do I put in for the playlist section of the ices0.conf file?

I've gone with ices0.4 because I am running an mp3. Can ices2.x run mp3 or only ogg?

The link on the ices page for an ice0 config file is broken, so that is why I am seeking help in this thread.

Thanks again for all the help.

karlH · Code Warrior Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 5476 Location: UK

IIRC If the filename from inside the playlist is a single hyphen then standard input is used (ie the pipe)

karl.

Liquid_Squelch · Joined: 11 Mar 2006 Posts: 56

After some playing around after your last advice...
Creating a playlist file called playlist.txt and defining an mp3 file works.
Editing the same file, and replacing the mp3 path with '-' seems to work, but I never see the mount on my Icecast server....

karlH · Code Warrior Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 5476 Location: UK

You'll have to check which part is failing, is the curl not working, is it getting valid data to parse. It doesn't look like the connection to icecast is done from that output.

One other problem will be that the metadata is not being transferred. The only app that did something like this was stream transcoder but you want it without the transcoding. you could use something like vlc to act as the relay but I haven't tried it like that.

karl.

Liquid_Squelch · Joined: 11 Mar 2006 Posts: 56

From what I can tell, curl is working.
Here is a verbose dump. I only assume that the hieroglyphics at the bottom of the capture is the binary mp3 in ASCII format.

karlH · Code Warrior Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 5476 Location: UK

based on the error log snippet there, it looks like ices is connecting and curl is retrieving content. I don't know of a way around the metadata issue unless you can use something like vlc to act as a reader and source client. I'm almost sure that ices only reads ID3 tags for metadata not icy metadata inserts.

karl.