About: Peercast

What is Peercast? Peercast is open source free software that supports streaming media (audio/video webcasting) peer to peer networks across the web. Webcasting involves sending media packets to each listener. This limits the number of people who can access the service owing to the cost of providing the necesary internet traffic (bandwidth) and the number of simultaneous connections a server can handle. Packets are dumped after use.

Peercasting avoids these problems by distributing the programme to a network consisting of a chain of listeners, who pass the packets on as they listen, thereby sharing the bandwidth. We ensure that listeners are not penalised by the extra traffic by keeping the bit rate as low as possible. We still have a central server, but it has to provide only a few root streams and a dynamic register of network connections, to allow for people joining and leaving the network.

How does it work? Since peercast looks after the stream routing, it has to be running before you can listen using a media player such as windows media player, zune, winamp, realplayer etc. When you click on the radio station address in your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.) it attempts to open the peercast server (you will get a connection failure message if peercast is not running) which generates an mp3 version of the address, so that your media player can be activated.

How Do We Use It? We run a peercast server at our studio which is set up as a root server. That means it supplies the programme feed and tracks the network, so that when someone disconnects, other listeners can continue to hear the programme. To do this, a network "yp address" has to exist in the peercast setup. The peercast installation files do not have our address, so we have provided ready-installed files that include it, for Windows, Linux and Winamp.

Download Windows Player: A windows player folder, click to unzip on your desktop, open it then use the Start and Stop files to play. The folder can be stored anywhere on your pc, on a cd or memory stick.

Download Winamp Peercast: Extract the files inside this peercastwinampplugins folder and copy them to the Winamp\Plugins folder. Run winamp before using our link.

Download Linux Peercast: These files can be stored anywhere on your pc, on a cd or memory stick. Extract the rslinuxpeercast folder and double click the STARTUP file (not the peercast one). If run failure occurs ensure that libstdc++.so.5.0.7 and link file libstdc++.so.5 are present in /usr/lib/, if not install them with the package manager. You can also run the plugin in Winamp under Wine.

More Peercast Stuff

Installation Downloads. General installation downloads of peercast are available for WINDOWS, apple MAC, LINUX and as a WINAMP windows plugin. If you decide to use these versions of the software you will have to change the yp address in the settings menu, see below. With the winamp plugin you can't connect from the webpage unless the player is already running and you will need to open your Peercast webpage to get into the settings pages. You can install both windows options if you wish, the winamp plugin is switched on or off via the winamp options menus.

You can download peercast for WINDOWS from our server or from one of the regular software source websites. Make sure you download it into the downloads folder or the desktop, where you won't lose it. Click on the file to get the windows installer running, then follow the prompts. In windows, double click the peercast horn icon on the desktop and look for the second icon which appears in the bottom right hand start-up menu bar. Right clicking on this will pop up a menu, you need to look for the item called advanced and then settings. This will bring up the peercast browser pages. Select the settings menu item.

The settings are mostly uncritical, apart from the network yp address, which should be changed from yp.peercast.org to www.webradio.org.uk:7144 (include the dots and colon between the words exactly as shown). Hit the "save settings" button and ensure that the setting has been changed. This enables your peercaster to find our network connections. You can close the browser pages when you have finished with the menus. If you want to close peercast, go to the lower icon, right click for exit and yes.

How do I use it? The procedure is: start peercast by double clicking on the horn icon, then click on the radio station webpage link which, after a few seconds will activate your media player assigned to play mp3's. You will also get security pop up's you will need to clear in some versions of windows. If you open the peercast relay pages you should see the radio station listed.

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