Xiph.org

//dir.xiph.org/

Xiph.org is a non-profit organization, which maintains and promotes the OGG streaming format, and develops audio compression schemes such as Vorbis, FLAC, Opus, or the Theora video encoding format. It also hosts a list of ICEcast streaming stations. ICEcast is their non-commercial pendant to the SHOUTcast server.

There are different ways for streamtuner2 to retrieve the station lists available on dir.xiph.org. That's because this is a primary plugin, and fallback solutions therefore important. Each fetching mode has its own advantages and drawbacks though.

Xiph also uses the .xspf playlist format, instead of just the more ancient Shoutcast .pls stream links.

Channel options.

Filter by minimum bitrate

The bitrate of an audio stream determines the music quality. Many Xiph streams have simple and low quality microphone sources. To filter these out, and only leave high quality music stations, you can therefore change this option. OGG starts to sound well with 96 kbit/s (whereas MP3 often requires 128 or 160 kbit/s at least).

Fetch mode

There are now three options to retrieve Xiph directory stations.

Cache JSON

There's a caching server specifically for streamtuner2. It fixes Xiphs quirky JSON API, and provides a simpler interface. It can't correct the invalid encodings however, which is why you see ???? question marks a lot. This method does not reveal station homepages, but enables the channel/server search.

Clunky YP.XML

The "yellow pages" YP.XML contains the full list of all known ICEcast streaming servers. It's however quite bulky and super slow to download. It furthermore clogs up a lot of memory, and requires manual searching (only cache search works). Which is why streamtuner2 is trying hard to avoid it. It doesn't contain station homepages either.

It's only still an option, because it's likely to remain accessible after Xiph.org rewrites their directory service. (Which though is getting delayed since a few years already.) You can set the special "buffy" mode in your settings.json to keep the whole YP.XML in memory. Which avoids the slow station list download/unpacking.

Forbidden fruits

As new alternative, you can let ST2 directly scrape the station lists from dir.xiph.org (like it does for other channels). This is something which Xiph doesn't approve of. But the drawbacks of their alternative offerings are too severe and user-unfriendly; which is why there's this raw HTML extraction mode now.

The website listings contain full station homepages and a few more extras. In this mode we can even acceess the XSPF playlist formats directly. Both, the server search function, or browsing by audio/video format are supported.