About Ezstream

Ezstream is a command line source client for Icecast media streaming servers. It began as the successor of the old "shout" utility, and has since gained a lot of useful features.

In its basic mode of operation, it streams media files or data from standard input without reencoding and thus requires only very little CPU resources. It can also use various external decoders and encoders to reencode from one format to another, and stream the result to an Icecast server. Additional features include scriptable playlist and metadata handling. All of its features make ezstream a very flexible source client.

Supported media formats for streaming are MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora. Native metadata support includes MP3 (ID3v1 only) and Ogg Vorbis, and many more formats when the optional TagLib support has been compiled in.

Ezstream is free software and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

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Download

Latest version: 0.5.6 [ Changes ]

Package	Download Link
Source .tar.gz (all platforms)	ezstream-0.5.6.tar.gz MD5: 1be68119d44fbe71454a901fa650a359
MS Windows binary (32bit)	ezstream-0.5.6-win32.zip MD5: 19c6f28c2de81e6e2fa3e0ed914e6696

Older releases can be found at http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ezstream/.

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Further Information

Dependencies

Ezstream depends on:

• libshout 2.2.x or later + libshout dependencies
  http://www.icecast.org/download.php
• libxml 2.x
  http://xmlsoft.org

Ezstream optionally uses:

• For reading metadata from Ogg Vorbis files:
  • TagLib 1.x (1.4 or newer recommended)
    http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html
  or:
  • libvorbis 1.x
    http://www.vorbis.com/
• For basic non-ASCII charset support in metadata and filenames:
  • GNU libiconv, if iconv() is not available in the system C library.
    http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/

UNIX (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, ...)

On UNIX and UNIX-like systems, such as Linux and *BSD, binary packages for the required libraries are usually available. To compile ezstream, ensure that the respective -devel packages are installed as well, if applicable. Further steps, and more, are explained in the README and INSTALL files inside the distribution package.

It might be a good idea to check whether the operating system vendor provides a binary package of a recent ezstream release and install that one instead of building from source.

Windows

Windows users can simply copy the ezstream.exe file from the binary distribution archive (.ZIP) to any location of their choosing. Users, who wish to be able to run ezstream anywhere on their system, can add the directory that contains ezstream.exe to their PATH environment variable.

The ezstream binary release depends on MSVC 2008 runtime libraries. These libraries can be downloaded from Microsoft as the vcredist_x86.exe file, at no cost.

Even more ...

Comprehensive documentation of ezstream and its configuration is included in the man page ezstream(1).

Those, who are interested in how ezstream development progresses, can stay informed by occasionally looking at the NEWS file. It is kept up-to-date with important changes in ezstream as they happen.

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Release Notes

Ezstream 0.5.6 has been released on August 31st 2009.

Version 0.5.6 is a maintenance and feature release.

Changes

• ezstream-file.sh:
  • NEW — Add and install ezstream-file.sh, a new convenience shell script that generates configuration and playlist from a template and command line, respectively. (Bourne shell and POSIX utilities required.)
• src/ezstream.c:
  • MISC — Be more tolerant towards faulty playlists and similar issues. Failure to open a resource (e.g. a media file) is no longer fatal and operation will continue until 100 subsequent errors. Based on an idea from dhorton. (Ticket #1585)
  • NEW — New command line option -s: Make ezstream function as a line-based shuffling utility.
• src/playlist.c:
  • MISC — Consider no output from a playlist program to be equivalent to an empty line, indicating that the end of the playlist is reached.
  • FIX — Do not complain when receiving an empty line from a playlist program.
• examples/:
  • NEW — Add a real-world example playlist script with logging feature.

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Support

Reporting Problems

In case of problems with ezstream, please make sure to re-read the documentation first and double-check your configuration. A lot of effort has been put into the ezstream(1) manual, and it should — at least in theory — answer all questions.

Of course, ezstream isn't immune to bugs. After checking if your bug is already known, or a newer ezstream release fixes your problem, it is much appreciated that you file your bug report with the Xiph.org bug tracker.

Please be as specific and verbose as necessary when submitting a problem report. Also, please include a valid e-Mail address when reporting an issue, in case there are follow-up questions.

Your contribution and efforts are very much appreciated. Thank you!

Contact

The current maintainer of ezstream is Moritz Grimm (mdgrimm at gmx dot net).

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