Icecast Streaming Media Server

[dan@loudaudio.co.uk]

I am currently using an Icecast stream to do live outside broadcast feeds into the studio of a small community radio station I'm involved with.

The system works very well, however every time I connect into the Icecast server from a remote location, it involves someone in the studio (or a remote connection into the server) to press 'play' on a playback client (VLC running on the same computer as the Icecast server) in order to play the audio out of the computer to a mixing desk. Not ideal...

What I am looking for, is a solution to avoid this step of having to start the playback manually and for the audio to just appear on the soundcard output ***as soon as someone starts streaming into the server***. That way, the main server computer in the studio can be locked away and does not need to be touched! Is it possible to configure the Icecast server to spit the audio out the soundcard without needing to use a playback client? If I have to use a playback client (running on the same machine as the Icecast server), it is possible to keep the stream "alive" even when nothing is streaming into the Icecast server and therefore VLC will only need to be started once?

I'm sure there must be a solution to this!

Running Windows XP although happy to go with a Linux solution if necessary..

Many thanks for any help.

Dan

[karlH]

icecast itself doesn't decode, although it could trigger a decode to start up.

For win32 and unix, you could use the <mount> <authentication type="url"> and just define an option of mount_add to call a web script which starts the playback or even the player itself. On unix, you also have the option of calling the <on-connect> script which runs a script on the icecast server.

karl.

[dan@loudaudio.co.uk]

Hi Karl,

Many thanks for your reply.

Glad an option exists! Could you kindly help me out with a little code for Win32, to call VLC or other player using the <mount> command as recemmended please?

Much appreciated

Dan

[karlH]

[gerrit]

You can put the playlist in a loop then vlc will start to play when the stream is up

[liteFun]

Looped playlist is not good if there's stuff for like 30mins and live stream for server should be broadcasted immediately. If it only needs to get played and nothing more, then it would work, just set playlist with url and repeat on.

Why don't you use vnc to operate server remotely? I would do that if i had bradcast going on studio and would need to stop current playlist and get live stream played outside studio. That way you could just add url to play between playlist items and after stream stops it would jump to next song.