<page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"
type="guide"
id="xiph">
<info>
<link type="guide" xref="index#channels"/>
<link type="guide" xref="channels#list"/>
<link type="guide" xref="configuration#plugins"/>
<desc>ICEcast radio directory.</desc>
</info>
<title>Xiph.org</title>
<subtitle><link href="http://dir.xiph.org/">//dir.xiph.org/</link></subtitle>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Xiph also uses the .xspf playlist format, instead of just the
more ancient Shoutcast .pls stream links.</p>
<section id="options">
<title>Channel options.</title>
<terms>
<item>
<title><code>Filter by minimum bitrate</code></title>
<p>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).</p>
</item>
<item>
<title><code>Fetch mode</code></title>
<p>There are now three options to retrieve Xiph directory stations.</p>
<p></p>
<terms>
<item>
<title><code>Cache JSON</code></title>
<p>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.</p>
</item>
<p></p>
<item>
<title><code>Clunky YP.XML</code></title>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>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 <file>settings.json</file>
to keep the whole YP.XML in memory. Which avoids the
slow station list download/unpacking.
</p>
</item>
<p></p>
<item>
<title><code>Forbidden fruits</code></title>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
</item>
</terms>
</item>
</terms>
</section>
</page>