Icecast Streaming Media Server

[Liquid_Squelch]

I am just looking for a few clarifications, and help with setting up a relay.

As I understand it, my PC will be the Slave Relay box (the one doing the relaying). The Master Relays (the PC's Hosting the audio feed) are called the master-relays, right?

Can I have more than 1 relay on a slave? I plan on having 3 to start with.

How does the relay work? Am I actually using my bandwidth to supply the relay feed, or is my Icecast session just redirecting the connecting party to the master/source IP and stream?

Also, while playing around last night, I was able to setup a test relay.
I was not able to change the name of the relay using the
<mount>/example.ogg</mount>
<local-mount>/different.ogg</local-mount>
settings.

I created a mount point for the example.ogg and made that hidden.
I then created a mount point for the /different.ogg (I'm using the example's wording here, i actually used /relay and /relay_test as my points, and they were mp3's not ogg's)

I'm basically looking at using the relay feature so that when some one wants to check out all the streams on my website, it looks nice in pretty in the stats.xsl page.

Thanks again!
If you need, I can send my logs and icecast.xml file as well.

Phil

[karlH]

An icecast can relay as many streams as you want. icecast will act as a listener to whatever the master is, listener redirection tends to be the other way but is not currently implemented yet in the release.

generally people use the term slave to indicate that the slave icecast will retrieve a series of mountpoints from the mastewr automatically, for these, the mountpoint names cannot be changed. If you using an explicit <relay> definition then you can change the local-mount.

karl.

[Liquid_Squelch]

Thanks for the reply Karl. I just have another quick question.

If I set the On Demand setting to on, the slave requests info from the master relay at all times. I notice from the Mountpoint window no the Icecast server, that the receive data is always going up. Is my slave silently listening to the audio stream, or is it just collecting the metatag info?

If its pulling the audio, that is really going to add to bandwidth, right?
If its just pulling metatag data, then it really just a packet or two, and I can deal with that.

What traffic exactly is going on when the on demand is active.

Also, can I use an <intro> tag with a relay? If not, that would be a great feature to add.

Thanks

[karlH]

If an on-demand relay is active then the stream is retrieved from the master server, any metadata is passed with the data. There is no separate channel/socket for metadata information (we could open a stats connection and retrieve metadata when inactive I suppose but that won't work relaying a shoutcast stream).

When on-demand is enabled then the stream will be shutdown when there are no listeners and fired back up when someone connects. Metadata is part of that stream.

The intro file is a mount setting so is completely independant of the relay mechanism, so yes it will work with a relay.

karl.