Tracking down strange Shoutcast behaviour; any ideas?

General Lighting

General Lighting

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I managed to finish work earlier than normal; so as well as listening to VFR Europe's AAC 96 stream whilst cycling home I turned on an old laptop with XBMC/Kodi and the Shoutcast addon; as this connected to the downstairs TV (XBMC found the milkdrop installation automatically!) and a cheap Chinese "hi fi" system with aux input is more appealing to listen to and watch than normal telly...

At first I just got a repeating buffer of the Shoutcast stream from here; and thought it was the old laptop being overloaded; but when I checked airtime there was a warning of "bad answer".

It must have packed up during the last hour or so as it was halfway through Robbie4Evers mix; the AAC streams were unaffected as they are derived from a 192k MP3 Icecast stream to a different server in DE (the playout in NL) that transcodes it via Liquidsoap (doing all of it on one server eventually causes Airtime to go pear shaped).

I had to restart the shoutcast server to get things running correctly again. I've had this happen (occasionally) before; with a "broken pipe"(?!) message. It could be Airtime sending flawed data; or some known bug in Shoutcast.

Whatever it is; it seems to be a greater issue with Shoutcast (we had all sorts of similar strangeness when Party Vibe Radio was doing the live shows); and the server had to be regularly restarted. Icecast seems more resilillent.

What should I be looking out for? I notice in the error log a lot of multiple connections from a UK IP and MPEG OVERRIDE but these aren't shown as listeners (it might just be that the client is also getting confused by the defective data); the source log (where I'd expect to see the NL IP from Airtime) is blank. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place?
 
Hi GL

Yeah very odd. You might like to try Icecast and see if the error persists. FYI : The "MPEG OVERRIDE" user agent is typically used for flash based players. We are unsure how the XBMC plugin connects but it is unlikely to be flash so it may be those log entries you are seeing aren't for the plugin. Check that out.
 
by the time I'd turned on xbmc the shoutcast stream had already gone over; as it was repeating a buffer of a previous show that I'd been listening to just a few minutes ago from the icecast server at the "earthstation".

XBMC reports itself as such in the user agent field

There is an Icecast addon for XBMC but it doesn't seem to pick up my stations even though I think it is shown public and I use the AAC transcodes only for mobile listening anyway.

When I had Airtime feeding the earthstation (both Icecast) and Liquidsoap generating the shoutcast stream on server 3 (airtimes advice is to use Icecast) there was another incident that ultimately knocked out the earthstation (and thus the whole lot.). I did think about using Icecast for everything but it still seems easier to get in directories/on TuneIn with a Shoutcast server..
 
I got this error again at some random time last night (I did grab the logs from the Shoutcast server end in case they give any clues) - again "bad answer".

The good news is my Icecast streams not just held up but now seem to be correctly picked up by XBMC media player (AAC-LC decoding is more intensive on a small tablet I was using for monitoring)

So if they can accept multiple mountpoints on the new panel and its possible to alias the 192k mp3 one to the port number (i.e so it appears to be just like a shoutcast stream to Tunein etc and the PVR player) that could be an option

that way I can use the earthstation (which is a percentage of a server borrowed from my employers) just for transcoding and the mountpoint for live DJs to connect to (which would have a fallback in case something goes wrong)

Once I am sure this all works correctly I will share how things like transcoding are done for everyone on here to make use of (it does mean having access to a proper VPS and knowing something about Linux command line but is not that difficult)
 
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Do keep us posted. We have in the past aliased an icecast server to relay from a shoutcast server. Another feature that's useful in the new control panel is that we can turn on raw editing of the icecast / shoutcast config files if you need to make any tweaks. Let us know if you want that enabled.
 
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