UDP Broadcasts in LAN?
 

hi!

i love using shoutcast, but i have to coupple with low bandwiths in a wireless LAN.

is it possible to use one UDP broadcast with shoutcast (e.g. to broadcast adress 192.168.10.255) and to catch that stream with any winamp in LAN? this would be very usefull and save a lot of bandwith.

thanks bye bye

It sounds like you are thinking of multicast, as opposed to unicast, and not UDP. The Shoutcast DNAS only uses TCP. Although IP multicast is similar to UDP in that IP multicasting is a best-effort protocol, it assumes some data can be lost or dropped. What's a few missing bytes to a digital audio stream?

Multicast is communication between a single sender and multiple receivers on a network. Using multicast, an application can send one copy of each packet and address it to the group of computers that want to receive it. The network then forwards the packets only to the computers that need to receive them. It was designed to more efficiently distribute real-time audio and video to the set of hosts that have “tuned” in. Multicasting is not connection-oriented and all traffic is handled at the transport layer with UDP.

In a multicast environment the “broadcast” server sends data to a very specific address. Any user/device that chooses to receive the broadcast “tunes” to that address and becomes aware of all media with that destination address.

You should be able to configure the DNAS to use a multicast address like 224.0.0.1. As you probably know, IP addresses are divided into “classes” based on the high order bits of a 32-bit IP address. Every IP whose destination address starts with “1110” is an IP multicast; the multicast “group” is identified by the remaining 28 bits. Multicast group addresses range from 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255.

The major problem with all of the wonderfulness of multicast is most ISP do not "route multicast." So it will probably only work on a single network.