Icecast Streaming Media Server

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I'm an Austrian sysadmin living in Montpezat (South France). I administer a handful of database servers and a few dozens of client machines in public libraries and town halls in eleven villages around here. Everything around here is running Linux (mainly CentOS 5, but also Slackware and Debian). I thought about setting up an Internet radio, just for fun, because I enjoy mixing tapes and CDs, and so my friends will connect to the radio instead of nagging me for that other CD to burn

I have a few general questions concerning the design of the thing, before I actually get my hands dirty on configuring details.

1) We have DSL here, but not with a high bandwidth. We're in a remote place, so bandwidth is between 512 kbps down / 128 kbsp up and 1Mbps down / 256 kbsp up. I think what I'd like to do is offer a low-quality mono stream to begin with. How low can I get the quality? Something like 24 kbps ogg or mp3? Is there some "required minimum" for the music bitrate?

2) Speaking of bitrate... let's say I use only ogg for streaming. If I decide to stream in, say, 48 kbps, does that mean that all the songs on the various playlists have to be encoded in 48 kbps fixed bitrate? I vaguely remember having fiddled with a shoutcast plugin for Winamp on a Windows machine something like five years ago, and the transmission bitrate was independent from the actual encoding bitrate.

3) Do I have to decide on either .ogg or .mp3? Or can I use both? Is there some format you guys recommend? (Besides the fact that .ogg is free and it's what I mainly use for private use )

So much for now. Any suggestions?

Cheers from the sunny south of France

[karlH]

no matter what the format decision you make, with a 128k or 256k upload limit, you are not going to have many listeners.

karl.

[Anonymous]

As karlH said, it doesn't matter which format you use; with a 128~256 upstream you will have just a few listeners. Consider buying a streaming host or a VPS.

Choose OGG format always since it's completely free and you don't have to deal with license issues.