All things related to multicast

[Gary Parker <>]

On 15 Jun 2007, at 11:37, Jeroen Massar wrote:

> Why not VLC? It is one of the best tools around. Note that one also  
> has
> vls which is the console part which is daemon only

<deep_intake_of_breath> You had to ask, didn't you? :)

Okay, I've set myself the task of setting up a PPC Mac Mini as an  
'appliance', if you will, to sit in a radio station and provide a  
live multicast audio stream fed to it's line-in. The OS X port of VLC  
won't accept anything other than files or network streams as input,  
so no piping of audio into stdin or yoinking the audio straight out  
of CoreAudio (as you can do with DirectShow on Windows or /dev/dsp on  
*nix). I've gotten around this so far by installing EsounD (the  
Enlightened Sound Daemon) and esdrec to get the system audio and pipe  
it into lame which is, in turn, piping into the aforementioned,  
hacked, testMP3StdStreamer.

esdrec | lame -b 128 - - | mp3stdinstreamer

This works quite nicely so long as nothing else is happening on the  
machine as the mp3stdinstreamer app does no internal buffering and  
the stream stutters badly when the app doesn't get the CPU time  
slices it expects.


> First thing you can look at is Shout2rtp:
> http://minnie.tuhs.org/Programs/Shout2rtp/
> Which can, as far as I recall, also stream from files directly.
> I have an IPv6 version of it if you need it.

Cheers, I'll have a look at that.


> Buffering should be handled in the client IMHO. Or do you mean  
> buffering
> while reading the file from stdin?

I'm pretty sure it's the buffering of reading from stdin that's the  
problem, although this may have more to do with Nick's mention of MP3  
behaving very well when streamed (thanks for that, btw, Nick. I'm  
compiling tooLame as I type).

Gary