Radio stream and Bandwidth consumption

[yeomanspc]

My family have some favorite radio stations that we can only listen to on the Slim Player. We have noticed bandwidth consumption has increased significantly as a result. In part this is because people select the radio on every SB as they go from room to room, and then either do not stop it or turn it off when they leave the room, or turn off the amplifier (not the SB). So I have a few questions..
1. If, when listening to internet radio, you simply turn the SB off, does it stop the streaming into the server? - I appreciate it stops streaming to the SB. (I assume it does).
2. If a radio station is already being streamed to one player, is it possible (has anyone considered) - as an option - automatically synching to the already streamed player to save upline bandwidth.
3. When synching players to a radio station I understand that they get out of synch due to 'no start of track' - has anyone considered (as a synch option) to insert a 're-synch' every (say) 5 minutes?

As a short term fix, I have installed the powersave plugin to turn players off every hour by default but this is a bit cumbersome.

[dean]

On Aug 5, 2006, at 2:27 AM, yeomanspc wrote:
> 1. If, when listening to internet radio, you simply turn the SB off,
> does it stop the streaming into the server? - I appreciate it stops
> streaming to the SB. (I assume it does).
It does.

> 2. If a radio station is already being streamed to one player, is it
> possible (has anyone considered) - as an option - automatically
> synching to the already streamed player to save upline bandwidth.
Only if you have the players set up as synced will it share a
stream. One issue here is that some stations have playlists and or
dynamically created streams, so sharing feeds might not work in a
significant number of cases.

> 3. When synching players to a radio station I understand that they get
> out of synch due to 'no start of track' - has anyone considered (as a
> synch option) to insert a 're-synch' every (say) 5 minutes?
That's something we're definitely planning on, keeping long songs and
radio stations in sync by tracking playback time with fine grained
network clocks.

> As a short term fix, I have installed the powersave plugin to turn
> players off every hour by default but this is a bit cumbersome.
That'll work too!

[dgpretzel]

> 2. If a radio station is already being streamed to one player, is it
> possible (has anyone considered) - as an option - automatically
> synching to the already streamed player to save upline bandwidth.
Only if you have the players set up as synced will it share a
stream. One issue here is that some stations have playlists and or
dynamically created streams, so sharing feeds might not work in a
significant number of cases.

Is it possible for the internet radio station to see only a single connection? Couldn't the SS do whatever repackaging is necessary to turn the single stream coming in from the outside into whatever it takes to service multiple SBs? Wouldn't that work regardless of whether the content is dynamic, or not? One incoming stream. Then either multiple streams are created for ewach SB, or it is turned into a multicast stream for the (few) number of local SBs?

I apologize if the question fails to make sense.

Regards,

DG