Hi everyone! I've been playing around with Icecast for the past week and using it in conjunction with DarkIce to stream live audio. It seems to be working well, the only thing I am not happy about is the fact that icecast uses unicast and that uses a lot of bandwidth.

My question is, 'Is there any way to make Icecast use multicast for streaming audio', or even, 'can I modify the code in icecast to make it use multicast and how would I go about doing that?'

If you have any ideas about any of this please let me know! Thanks to all!

Leo.

I've never used icecast before but I just quickly took a look at their site and as far as I can see it's based on the TCP/IP protocol. To get it to work with multicast it will have to be using the UDP/IP protocol. Might be quite a bit of work to change the code to work like that.

I thought that TCP/IP is just somewhat of a general name for a collection of internet protocols which include UDP. Isn't, as a matter of fact, UDP is just a non-connection based counter part of TCP. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks.

TCP/IP actually has come to have two separate meanings. It can mean the "TCP/IP Protocol Suite" which is sort of everything between sockets and ethernet, or it can mean TCP over IP (Transmission Control Protocol over Internet Protocol), which is the connection oriented communication protocol. Sometimes it is confusing and most people use TCP/IP to mean TCP over IP and just UDP (Unreliable Datagram Protocol) to mean UPD over IP. You can also use IP without TCP or UDP for communications (raw sockets).