I know that ogg vorbis files can be streamed and have their bitrates lessened if needed to send to people with slower connections much like how RealServer with its SureStream stuff. I don't really want to do any live broadcasting, just a streaming audio server that people can listen to. Is there a server that is similar to RealServer in this way (static files and can lower the bitrates)?

I just talked with Michael Smith alias "Vakor" at #vorbis, who is one of the Icecast (Vorbis streaming server) developers (http://icecast.org/).

"There's not yet streaming server which supports Vorbis bitrate peeling (adaptive bitrates for listeners). The design makes it possible to do proper adaptive bitrates for listeners, but current streaming servers don't do that yet. Support for that should come reasonably soon after vorbis 1.0."

Anyway, when available, Vorbis bitrate peeling will be more efficient than Real's SureStream. What RealServer does is that it dynamically changes the stream that a listener is listening to, based on available bandwidth, to one of several versions at a variety of bitrates. Vorbis' bitrate peeling allows much smoother bitrate modification: there aren't any different ready made streams like in Real's case. Vorbis streaming with bitrate peeling will adaptively scale the original stream's bitrate based on the available bandwidth.

Damn, thanks anyway!

Yes, I know they are technically different in that aspect. I was just using Real as an example of what I'd like to do

Any timeframe on 1.0 (days, weeks, months...or years?)

Well, RC4 will be the last Release Candidate, and it should become 1.0 version very soon after that, if everything goes well.
I think we are talking max few months.

a. is bitrate peeling available today? (what server) or if not, is there a real-like 'switch between streams depending on the bandwidth' solution?

b. did some1 tested the quality of the vorbis stream vs real stream? (also at the really low bitrate conditions)

c. i have an old icecast binary for windoze, is there a supernew compile available somewhere? (or is this the latest - http://www.oddsock.org/tools/ ?)

tia

'Proof of Concept' bitrate peeling stuff has been done, but according to the vorbis-dev guys, quite a considerable amount of work needs to be done on the encoder before this can become truly viable. So, although it will probably happen at sometime in the future, don't hold your breath!

tnx john33,

i did listen to some of the real streams and they dont sound bad at all (at 30kbit/s), curently iam downloading 'Helix Universal Server' which is supposed to be available free for 1 year..., i will try to make some listening test vs vorbis.
(So far i have a feeling that vorbis might be usefull only for 64-128 kbit range, pls tell me iam wrong )

d. how about multiple streams with icecast - possible? (i know there is a transcoder, but i cant make it work, its bad idea anyway imho)

e. multicast with icecast -possible?

f. what happened to the bbc streams? - licensing problems? ( http://support.bbc.co.uk/ogg/ )

g. is vorbis allready incorporated into new helix/realplayer solutions?

tia