Icecast Streaming Media Server

[Frank Cox]

Greetings! My name, as you can see, is Frank Cox, and I am looking into a project that will involve streaming a FM radio station over the Internet. Icecast seems to be the generally recommended way to do this.

I have been playing with computers for over 30 years, and have experience running publicly accessible web and email servers, and do some tech work for a cable TV/Internet/phone company.

My experience and knowledge in this area is mainly centered around Linux, specifically Red Hat, Fedora and Centos.

The website (such as it is) for the radio station lives on my webserver. The current plan is to get a dedicated computer with a couple of ethernet cards in it to handle the streaming, plug an FM radio into the computer to receive the signal from the radio station, and hook it up to Internet connections in my basement. I could then post a link to the streams on the station's webpage ("Click here to listen") and, hopefully, let 'er rip.

I'm thinking that a quad-core Intel machine should have the horsepower to encode the incoming audio and stream it on two 1mbps Internet connections.

This project is currently at the "we're just about ready to get started" stage, basically waiting for final budget approval.

Since I have never done streaming audio before, I would appreciate any input that you may have regarding this project before we spend a bunch of money on it and maybe could have done things in a better way.

The cost of a 1mbps upload connection here is approximately 5x cheaper than a 2mbps upload connection, so I'm thinking that two 1mbps connections should give us something that's good for at least a start, and we can add more Internet connections and ethernet cards to the computer as needed. If the project REALLY takes off with the public we'll look at a dedicated fiber connection or something at that time.

I can't find any definitive numbers to tell me how many streams we can realistically plan to provide to the public on a 1mbps upload connection. My best wild guess so far is 25-30 streams per connection, so two "internet services" should provide 50 streams or so. Is this realistic?

We would stream at the lowest bandwidth that we can get away with that still sounds good -- 28k? While the FM station itself broadcasts in stereo, would we save anything on bandwidth by streaming only in mono?

My experience is with Red Hat style operating systems so I had intended to set the server up using Centos 5, but have just been reading about the problem that some folks are having getting Icecast2 compiled on Centos 5 so I'm wondering if I would be smarter to use another operating system. I see that the latest version of Fedora has icecast2 available directly from one of the standard repositories. Since this would be the streaming server and not the main webserver, I could live with putting Fedora 11 on it instead of Centos if I have to.

Would ices or ezstream be best for this application? Or is there something else that's better yet? As I mentioned before, I want to plug a radio into "line in" on the computer and grab the audio from there.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

[karlH]

If you are talking about 32k streams then your figures of 30 listeners per link will be the maximum (assuming 1Mbps is the actual available bandwidth). Whether you feel a 32k stream (mono or stereo) is best is subjective but obviously with say vorbis then you'll need to most recent aotuv tuned encoder to get the best results. Going mono will save some more bits so you could get a few more listeners

karl.

[Frank Cox]

[karlH]

if all you want is to encode from live input to a stream then ices is fine. ezstream is really just a wrapper for libshout and is fine for sending pre-encoded content.

karl.

[Frank Cox]

Thank you ever so much for your help, Karl!

I sincerely appreciate your assistance and, frankly, have a much better understanding of how to proceed with this project than I did earlier.

Thank you again... I'm sure I'll be back to bug you again

[Frank Cox]

I am pleased to announce that this project is now up and running, and you're welcome to tune in.

CHXL
95.3 CreekFM
FIFTY THOUSAND WATTS of POW WOW POWER!
Serving the File Hills First Nations, and the World!

CreekFM is owned and operated by the Okanese First Nation on their reserve near Balcarres, Saskatchewan, Canada.

It is the only native-owned and operated radio station in Saskatchewan.

www.creekfm.com

The webserver runs Apache on Centos 5. The audio server runs Ices and Icecast on Centos 5.