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

ask your users what they want

[truffle]

Why not ask both the people who listen to your stream what format they'd like the music in?

Re:RealPlayer?

[Paladin128]

AAC has a lossless mode, but the default is NOT lossless. I'm good friends with a Dolby engineer that worked for the company while they developed AAC. One internal thing that they didn't want to let out is that AAC is better in every way than Dolby Digital AC3.

Besides, for good lossless, we have Ogg FLAC.

As far as the frame jitter issue goes, any decent CD player that has a 16-frame buffer (a whole whopping 256 bytes -- could be cache on the D/A chip) could effectively eliminate jitter. Period. In modern CD-players, it's not an issue, regardless of what your friendly neighborhood audio store will say. Same with "greening" cd's. It's psuedoscience that sounds feasible, but in reality is a load of crap.