Icecast Streaming Media Server

cmodyssey · Joined: 28 Mar 2008 Posts: 63

Hi,

I've not been playing with icecast for very long and I'm just trying to figure out if icecast can do this.

Say that source number 1 connects and start streaming to icecast.

Then listeners start listening to the stream, which works OK.

Then source number 1 disconnects from icecast and source number 2 connects to icecast.

What the listeners experience is just silence as soon as source number 1 disconnects and the audio from source number 2 does not come through.

The only way to get the listener to hear the audio, is to click on the "Click to Listen".

Is there any way to make sure that the listener does not have to do anything to listen to source number 2 without doing anything?

Even if a 2 hour mp3 is played (as source 2 may take a few seconds or a few hours to start streaming)

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Here is a censored version of my current config file:

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

read the docs, you should find what you want with the fallback-mount and fallback-override settings. You can specify a file in webroot if you wish.

karl.

cmodyssey · Joined: 28 Mar 2008 Posts: 63

Hi karlH,

Thanks for your reply.

If I can simplify my query and then explain why I'm not to sure about using the fallback-mount and fallback-override settings, as I've already used them and have not got what I wanted out of them.

So, for the simple query, please could you let me know which documentation will help me resolve the listener not hearing anything when source number 2 starts streaming to icecast.

For the more complex query, where fallback-mount and fallback-override work towards what I am looking for, I have seen a thread on this where this has been tried and I also experience the same thing myself.

What happens is I specify a 2 hour long mp3 as the file in webroot and when source 1 disconnects, the listener starts hearing the content of the mp3 file, which is great so far. The problem I have with these settings is that once source number 2 starts streaming to icecast, the listeners do not get to hear the audio from source number 2 until about 5 minutes later.

I have heard that this is something to do with the speed that the mp3 file gets 'streamed' into icecast, so I know there is an explanation for it. Is there a way of making icecast 'flush' any buffer it has from the file in webroot as soon as source number 2 connects, so that the listeners do not have to wait 5 minutes to hear the audio from source number 2?

Thanks again,

Richard.

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

Your last paragraph describes the issue directly, unfortunately when you send an unregulated file as part of the stream then the listeners buffer (TCP and app buffer) will expand to the 5 mins of audio that you are experiencing. icecast cannot flush data that has already been sent. The only way to make it regulated at the moment is to fallback to a stream not a file, which would mean either running the fallback stream all the time or hook in some scripts to start/stop the fallback stream using the on-[dis]connect tags.

karl.