Programming Shoutcast support
 

Hi, I'm the creator of a not-very-well-known media player. A few friends use it besides me, but they have requested I include support for streaming audio.
I'd like to know if there is any documentation on the codec and/or protocol for ShoutCast, so that I can include it in my program.

heh .... SHOUTcast is not open source.

Sorry, but I do not think you are going to have any luck with this.

However, all of need to do is get an mp3codec that it can use, and tell it how to understand a .pls file (which is going to be difficult without the source).

Sorry for the bad news :(

From what I see of an example ShoutCast PLS file, it just has an entry count, followed by a list of entries. I'm guessing the actual information is stored on the server it lists to.
Would it break any laws if I packet log the transfers, or would it be useless anyway?

PLS files have been around before SHOUTcast. If you are working on tring to figure out how to support those...
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....threadid=65772

No, I'm looking to support ShoutCast broadcasts. M3U and PLS file support is easy. :P

OK.... lets step back (I misunderstood and fed somewhat false info).

Do you simply want your player to be able to "tune in" to a SHOUTcast stream, or do you want your player to be able to host a live stream and have that be listed on the SHOUTcast servers page? The first is possible, the latter is not --- well at least not with SHOUTcast. However, you could look to something that is opensource such as icecast...

I just want to listen, not create. Sorry for the confusion.

ahhhh...

Well, as you mentioned, all you need to be able to do is make the software understand that it needs to link to a specific address to get the stream from. All a .pls file is is a link to another source.

As mentioned, you may want to look at icecast for the source code to all of this.

Thank you. I'll look into it.

http://forums.radiotoolbox.com/viewtopic.php?t=74
http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...ease_id=179152
The latter has some code for their shoutcastsourc. basically a stream decoding library.