Icecast Streaming Media Server

[drewyboy]

I'm new to this, but I can't find any info on why people are using the KH over the Vanilla. I'm seeing a lot of ppl using Flash as primary delivery using KH.

I've got a HE-AAC streaming to my ice cast server and having one heck of time getting it to play in a flash player. I've tried both jPlayer and Jwplayer, and neither are working. I prefer jplayer just because it's dead simple to setup. So, any help regarding getting HE-AAC into a player working or why KH is preferred would be much appreciated.

[karlH]

flash is very sensitive to problems in the content it receives, no tolerance to resync and has a big problem in leaking memory as it treats the stream as like a cached file. The kh build has some knowledge within it that recognises mp3 and aac content, enough to help handle both aspects above. The first is that on a fallback type event, a complete frame is allocated for so resync is avoided, the second (and more generally needed) is that FLV wrapping can be performed if requested.

For some reason, streams in an FLV container do not suffer the same memory problem in flash as normal streams, and also metadata is handled as part of the stream (no nasty tricks like polling a server for metadata). As the main release of icecast is an official Xiph project and there to support free codecs then that means mp3 and aac are not supported, they can pass through icecast but do not get parsed in any significant way.

For most players this is not an issue as they handle resync and don't leak memory but flash has always been that bit more awkward.

karl.