Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Icecast + VLC Installation and Configuration Guide

Making VLC work with IceCast is not hard but there are some minor settings that were not obvious to me and I spent some time to figure them out.

IceCast


First, download and install IceCast. That's pretty much a next next next installation. When done start the IceCast Server.


Now, if you open this address with a browser, you can see that the server is running.


Eventually, you may want to edit the IceCast configuration to customize the port, the number of streams and the passwords. (Configuration -> Edit Configration).


VLC


I have VLC Media Player 2.0.8 Installed. I am going to stream some mp3 files to IceCast.

First, I have to enable MP3 streaming at the IceCast Output plugin module.

In VLC, go to Preferences (Enable advanced settings) -> Stream Output -> Access Output -> Shoutcast and check Stream MP3. On this page you can also set the name of the radio station, genre and other details.



















Now, let's add the mp3 files for streaming:
  • In VLC go to Media -> Stream
  • Add the mp3 files
  • Click Stream


















  • Click Next
















  • Select IceCast from the dropdown and click Add















  • I'll enter localhost for the address since both VLC and IceCast are on the same machine. Otherwise I would enter the IP Address of the computer running IceCast.
  • I'll enter radio1 for the mount point. It is highly recommended to specify a mount point, I couldn't make this working without entering one.
  • source:hackme is the Login:pass combo in my case because I did not change the default password in the configration file. You should do that. The login is always "source".
  • I won't activate transcoding since my files are already in mp3 format.
  • Click Stream


Now I can see that the music is "playing" in VLC.






















For the proof of concept, I will open this stream on a different computer with foobar2000. Note the /radio1 at the end of the URL, this is the mount point.













Notes


When everything is running, opening the Stream URL in the browser will bring up the IceCast status & admin page with some useful info. The default admin credentials are admin / hackme.






















Additional resources


IceCast Official Documentationhttp://www.icecast.org/docs/icecast-2.3.3/



2 comments:

  1. Another source client for Windows: http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/h-search.php?key=ices-ne&pushbutton=Search

    It is best suited for fully automatic broadcast.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dude, that was great, I was trying hard to do this.

    ReplyDelete