Flash streaming player: shoutcast (mp3/aacplus), windows media audio

Question

Is there a flash player that could handle all of the formats mentioned above. Or different players that could handle it?

Answer 1

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/hd_video_flash_player.html explains Flash 9's h.264 and aac support. Presumably Flash can play aac audio without h.264 video. Someone wrote an ogg vorbis player in Flash (http://drawlogic.com/2008/10/04/as3-fvorbis-flash-ogg-vorbis-player/) and the performance was acceptable. It's not written in ActionScript. It's written in a different language that compiles to Flash-compatible bytecode.

If you want to play wma, look no further than Silverlight. http://silverlight.net/forums/p/2786/7569.aspx lists all the supported codecs. Silverlight 3 also allows you to write your own audio codecs in managed code.

JOrbis is a Java applet that can play ogg/vorbis including internet radio.

Answer 2

SHOUTcast can be handled, but not very well. Flash can fetch a shouted stream, but only as a plain MP3-over-HTTP request, so you don't get the chunked metadata. And because Flash is fetching a stream as a whole file, memory fills up with the fetched MP3. You can work around it by switching to a new stream every so often, disgarding the old stream data, but this can leave a little desynchronisation on each reseek.

I've used minicaster for this before.

I don't know of anything that'd play AAC or WMA. Flash 10 gives you direct access to audio output, which would allow you to write/port an AAC or WMA decoder in ActionScript, but the performance would be terrible.

Answer 3

Another way of playing AAC shoutcast streams in flash player would be to relay the shoutcast stream to a wowza media server (it's simple to do that from the wowza media server side using a file in folder content like shoutcast.stream and starting it from the http://[wowza address]/streammanager panel)

after that just play your shoutcast stream using the generated wowza link:

rtmp://[wowza address]/live/flv:shoutcast.stream/playlist.m3u8

for example.

I have noticed that you can full flash player if you can switch your stream link to .flv (seen this with Icecast v2 KH versions)

Answer 4

This works great for mp3s. http://flash-mp3-player.net