What's the best protocol for live audio (radio) streaming for mobile and web?

Question

I am trying to build a website and mobile app (iOS, Android) for the internet radio station. Website users broadcast their music or radio and mobile users will just listen radio stations and chat with other listeners.

I searched a week and make a prototype with Wowza engine (using HLS and RTMP) and SHOUTcast server on Amazon EC2.

Using HLS has a delay with 5 seconds, but RTMP and SHOUTcast has 2 second delay. With this result I think I should choose RTMP or SHOUTcast.

But I am not sure RTMP and SHOUTcast are the best protocol. :(

What protocol should I choose? Do I need to provide a various protocol to cover all platform?

Answer 1

This is a very broad question. Let's start with the distribution protocol.

Streaming Protocol

HLS has the advantage of allowing users to get the stream in the bitrate that is best for their connection. Clients can scale up/down seamlessly without stopping playback. This is particularly important for video, but for audio even mobile clients are capable of playing 128kbit streams in most areas. If you intend to have a variety of bitrates available and want to change quality mid-stream, then HLS is a good protocol for you.

The downside of HLS is compatibility. iOS supports it, but that's about it. Android has HLS support but it is still buggy. (Maybe in another year or two once all the Android 3.0 folks are gone, this won't be as much of an issue.) JWPlayer has some hacks to make HLS work in Flash for desktop users.

I wouldn't bother with RTMP unless you're only concerned with Flash users.

Pure progressive streaming with HTTP is the route I almost always choose to go. Everything can play it. (Even my Palm Pilot's default media player from 12 years ago.) It's simple to implement and well understood.

SHOUTcast is effectively HTTP, but a poorly implemented version that has compatibility issues, particularly on mobile devices. It has a non-standard status line in its response which breaks a lot of clients. Icecast is a good alternative, and is what I would recommend for production use today. As another option, I have created my own streaming service called AudioPump which is HTTP as well, and has been specifically built to fix compatibility with oddball mobile clients, such as native Android players on old hardware. It isn't generally available yet, but you can contact me at [email protected] if you want to try it.

Latency

You mentioned a latency of 2 seconds being desirable. If you're getting 2-second latency with SHOUTcast, something is wrong. You don't want latency that low, particularly if you're streaming to mobile clients. I usually start with a 20-second buffer at a minimum, which is flushed to the client as fast as it can receive it. This enables immediate starting of the stream playback (as it fills up the client-side buffer so it can begin decoding) while providing some protection against buffer underruns due to network conditions. It's not uncommon for mobile users to walk around the corner of a building and lose their nice signal quality. You want your stream to survive that as best as possible, so if you have already sent the data to cover the drop out, the user doesn't have to know or care that their connection became mediocre for a short period of time.

If you do require low latency, you're looking at the wrong technology entirely. For low latency, check out WebRTC.

You certainly can tweak your traditional internet radio setup to reduce latency, but rarely is that a good idea.

Codec

Codec choice is what will dictate your compatibility more than anything else. MP3 is easily the most compatible, and AAC isn't far behind. If you go with AAC, you get better quality audio for a given bitrate. Most folks use this to reduce their bandwidth bill.

There are licensing fees with MP3, and there may be with AAC depending on what you're using for a codec. Check with a lawyer. I am not one, and the licensing is extremely complicated.

Other codecs include Vorbis and Opus. If you can use Opus, do so as the licensing is wide open and you get good quality for the bandwidth. Client compatibility here though is the killer of Opus. (Maybe in a few years it will be better.) Vorbis is a mediocre codec, but is free and clear.

On the extreme end, I have some stations doing their streaming in FLAC. This is lossless audio quality, but you're paying for 8x the bandwidth as you would with a medium quality MP3 station. FLAC over HTTP streaming compatibility is not code at the moment, but it works alright in VLC.

It is very common to support multiple codecs for your streams. Depending on your budget, if you can't do that, you're best off with MP3.

Finally on encoding, don't go from a lossy codec to another lossy codec if you can help it. Try to get the output stream as close to the input as possible. If you re-encode audio, you lose quality every time.

Recording from Browser

You mentioned users streaming from a browser. I built something like this a couple years ago with the Web Audio API where the audio is captured and then encoded and sent off to Icecast/SHOUTcast servers. Check it out here: http://demo.audiopump.co:3000/ A brief explanation of how it works is here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/20850467/362536

Anyway, I hope this helps you get started.