Streaming Audio in Rails WebApp (mp3/ogg)

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am trying to figure out the best way to stream audio from a rails app, however all I can find are flash based mp3 streaming options. I was looking at the XSPF Web Music Player, which does flash based mp3 streaming with XSPF playlists (musicplayer.sourceforge.net), which could work, however I'm looking for alternatives that would be capable of streaming ogg vorbis files. Does flash support ogg yet? Are there any other options for me to stream ogg tracks in my rails app? Suggestions?

Thanks, Mojo

2

I know Wikipedia uses a Java applet for playing ogg files, which is probably OSS. Note that neither that nor the Flash player is actually streaming, as they download the file to the client, playing it while downloading..

3

I once wrote a simple Rails app that used DRb to trigger a server that, in turn, used ruby-shout/libshout (?) to trigger icecast to play a file. It wasn't too hard; in fact, the only trickiness was using a mutex to make sure I didn't try to run two "play" commands at once.

I don't have it anymore, but again, it wasn't too hard to write (and I was a total Rails novice at the time).

I -think- Icecast can play .ogg files. I also -think- that, in general, if you send down the right content-type, most embedded players will start streaming automatically these days.