How could I play a shoutcast/icecast stream using HTML5?

Question

Is it possible to play a shoutcast/icecast stream using HTML5?

If so, how should I implement it?

Answer 1

There is a big problem with SHOUTcast, which I suspect is responsible for it not working even in Chrome which is supposed to support MP3.

SHOUTcast can serve three different types of response:

• a native-SHOUTcast “ICY” protocol streaming audio response. It decides to do this if the player accessing the stream includes an icy-metadata: 1 header.

• a plain-HTTP streaming audio response, without extra metadata, for media players with no ICY support.

• the “SHOUTcast D.N.A.S. Status” page and other pages on the web interface.

How does it decide whether to serve a web page instead of an audio stream? It guesses whether you're using a web browser. By looking to see whether the User-Agent header starts with Mozilla/.... Because all web browsers are Mozilla, right? Jeez, SHOUTcast.

So when Chrome tries to fetch the audio stream to play, SHOUTcast thinks it's a web browser (well... it is) and refuses to give it the audio stream to put in the audio tag. Instead it gets the admin web page.

(I would guess Safari is passing the icy-metadata header to avoid the problem, having specific support for SHOUTcast. I can't test it at the moment as Safari won't play audio or video. Maybe it wants me to install QuickTime for that. Maybe it can go get stuffed.)

So you'll probably need to add a Flash audio player as fallback.