Simplest Ogg Streaming Clients for non-Unix Users?

Dr. Smeegee asks: "I recently set up an .ogg stream for beta testing, on a website chronicling my hometown's music scene in the 80's. I stream nothing but independent bands from the Evansville area. I chose IceCast using Ogg Vorbis for obvious reasons. The only problem is, I've been using ogg123 on BSD for so long, I didn't realize that streaming Ogg support is sketchy at best on the Windows and Mac platforms. Can anyone suggest good players? Or am I going to have to downgrade my sound and stream in .mp3?" "I have provided my potential users links to these applications that claim to play .ogg streams:

Zinf
VLC for Windows
OggDS plugin for Windows Media Player
Winamp 2.81
Whamb
MacAmp Lite, and the
Quicktime Plug-In

However, am still getting complaints of flaky behaviour not linked to the stream itself. One Mac OS X user in particular, using MacAmp, could play the stream, but the system kept a download dialog up the whole time! Most, however, complain that the applications flat won't play streams."

Comments

Winamp 5.05

[kyhwana]

Winamp 5.05 plays ogg streams just fine..

About WinAmp 2.81

[SteWhite]

I use WinAmp 2.81 to play OGG streams.

The important thing with this one is to ensure you get the full version, not the lite one. The lite one doesn't have the necessary features.

xine

[PerlDudeXL]

I'm a little peeved that xine doesn't play ogg streams properly. it stops playing after a song change or so. annoying.

JOrbis - Java Applet

[EABinGA]

Try JOrbis, the pure java Ogg Vorbis decoder as an applet.

Re:RealPlayer?

[Anonymous Coward]

try AAC, its lossless unlike ogg

Ogg can be lossless. You are mistaking Ogg for Vorbis.

Re:The opposite of WINE?

[hey!]

For instances like this where Linux has a good app, but Windows does not, could a WINE-like product be useful?

It's called Cygwin.

The typical ./configure, make sequence works for many Linux packages.

However, it's not a solution for "drive by" internet users.

Java client

[Frodo420024]

At Diamondway Teachings we use a simple Java client (don't remember which one) for the purpose. We're streaming Ogg, as it sounds LOTS better than MP3 at very low bitrates.

VLC all the way

[j0kkk3l]

Streaming wirh vlc is really easy. Just follow the streaming howto pdf on their website. http://www.videolan.org
there are even clients available for almost all platforms and you may also stream videos!

foobar2000

[Skuto]

http://foobar2000.org

Simple. Works.

The author is the original author of the Winamp Vorbis support...

Foobar 2000

[EvilIdler]

You could try Foobar 2000 for Windows.
I haven't tried any Ogg/Vorbis streaming with it, but please post
some links if you're not afraid of the hordes ;)

Re:The opposite of WINE?

[jonadab]

Agreed. In terms of _working_, cygwin is somewhat better than WINE (assuming
you have the source of the app you want to run; it's not much good for running
binaries, obviously). This is presumably because the POSIX API and stuff
doesn't have to be reverse-engineered to be implemented.

But as you say, neither WINE nor Cygwin is really appropriate for the hurried,
"Just run this _now_ and don't bug me with setup" user. Some distros claim to
have WINE pre-set-up so that running popular Windows apps is almost that easy,
but in practice it usually doesn't work out that way -- and Cygwin doesn't
even attempt that, AFAIK, because it is squarely aimed at an audience of tech
users who know *nix but are on a Win32 platform for other reasons.

I would think the solution for getting *nix apps running on Windows would in
most cases be porting them over. Granted, this has to be done for each and
every app, and end users can't do it... but the end results should be a lot
better than with emulation. Using Gimp on Windows is a lot nicer than using
a Windows app on Linux with WINE. Sure, the scrollbars are a bit funky (since
Gimp uses GTK, not the native widgets), but that's minor.

Re:The opposite of WINE?

[amorsen]

Actually it's called coLinux. Binary compatibility can be very useful.