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Live Vorbis Streams Over 802.11b From SXSW.com
chupacabra writes "SXSW.com in Austin, Texas has a group of computers in various music venues around town. The ices/icecast stream is sent over 802.11 to a main server at SXSW. There are 6 venues running as of this moment. Thanks to the folks at Vorbis and their CVS we are rocking.
See sxsw.com/music/livestreams."
The sound quality sorta sucks. It not vorbis's fault - I can't really hear artifacts. It's just the mics/equipment/soundcards they're using, I guess.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I think you misunderstood...
They're not using WiFi to let people tune in, but rather to broadcast it. Since it looks like they're doing five different streams at a time, and I'm willing to bet that those places don't have the most accessible internet connections, they're using WiFi Texas to get a connection to each club. There, they've got G3 computers running Gentoo and some streaming software going. After it's encoded, they use the wireless to send it to their XServe (also running Gentoo), which streams it to the internet at large.
Personally, I think this qualifies as being "cool."
The player you need (if on Windows) is Winamp 2.81, it could be that RealAudio owns the m3u filetype, but if you can point .m3u to Winamp, it will work.
The 802.11b link is only used for one stream per stage, the icecast server takes this one stream and sends it out to thousands of users at once over a wired LAN. So far, the capacity of the server has not been met. We would like to know what the limit is.
If were to roam onto the WiFi network (ssid = wifi-texas), then you would actually get your streams from the icecast server, not from the stage system directly.
Because of distance limits, Line Of Sight problems, and other factors, three or four wireless hops connect each stage to the icecast server.
hope this helps.