Game Development Community

Consume an Internet Radio Stream?

by Dave Young · in Torque Game Engine · 10/26/2007 (1:13 pm) · 8 replies

If anyone has an idea of a good api, starting point, please shout it out.

I'd like to consider consuming an internet radio feed from within TGE. Thoughts?

#1
10/26/2007 (1:26 pm)
Fmod reads ogg streams.
ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu) in concert with libsdl (http://www.libsdl.org) can probably also do it, altho may be overkill.
#2
10/26/2007 (1:30 pm)
Fwiw, we've used fmod to stream a bunch of radio streams in vSide. the only difficulty is that you're limited to ogg streams. if you're providing the stream that's no problem, but if not you of course need to match the format of the source.
#3
10/26/2007 (1:36 pm)
Orion, thanks. It's exactly what you're doing in vSide that made me think it was possible :) Didn't see any client side music files...

I don't mind ogg streams, since I don't know the first thing about ogg streams, they certainly don't bother me hehe.
#4
10/26/2007 (2:44 pm)
Subscribed to the thread :)
Dave, keep us informed on progress. I'm interesting in this too, but for our project it's "a feature for the future", so I'm just gathering info about this for now :)
#5
11/07/2007 (2:13 pm)
Started in on looking at fmod to see where the connection points lie. The future has a way of creeping closer, and now this is a bigger need!

From a technology perspective it seems like the right way to go is to not use the client/server network stream but rather to wire up the clients to consume a stream from various sources, and provide the ability to switch among them.

This works great if you were going to be doing a station type source, but what if you wanted to let a client play a specific song from a list of songs? Wouldnt work so great then, there would need to be some stream sending it down the pipe.

A little more interesting would be an autoupdate approach, where (provided the music was licensed) the client could actually grab an .ogg and download it, then play it.
#6
11/07/2007 (2:24 pm)
> what if you wanted to let a client play a specific song from a list of songs?
i would check on the legality of that..
that's a lot more like downloading songs versus listening to a radio station.
#7
11/07/2007 (2:26 pm)
Absolutely. This method would only work if the songs were licensed for such.
#8
11/07/2007 (2:44 pm)
O gotcha. you said that.
fmod may be able to stream the files straight off an HTTP server.
w/o having to DL the whole thing first.