My Cubox server offers a lot of services and one I specially appreciate when I'm not at home is that it contains all my music I can access through HTTP(S) interface. This is really fine for Linux clients where mplayer is installed, but it's not the case for Windows : VLC refuse to play my music (which requires login/password) and Windows player doesn't support m3u playlists, so I have to play each track individually.

I started to look for streamer software and the biggest open source one is Icecast which implement SHOUTcast standard. Like for all my online services, software must be lightweight (I don't have a lot of RAM) ! Plus I don't have any sound card plugged and don't want to spare cpu bandwidth with decoding/encoding files. This is a reason why basic HTTP(S) transfert is good : files are trasfered as is. Even if it's not clearly indicated by the documentation, icecast coupled with ezstream has all the qualities I need ! I was really suprised to find how it was easy to setup !

Here is a tutorial for basic setup (with current Debian stable distribution) :

If ezstream is available in your repository

sudo apt-get install icecast2 ezstream

If not (for an ARM target)

sudo apt-get install icecast2 libshout3 libtagc0 libxml2
wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/e/ezstream/ezstream_1.0.1-1_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i ezstream_1.0.1-1_armhf.deb

Now, we have to configure icecast. You must edit /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml. Update (at least) :

• Admin name/address
• Server address
• Optional : server port

Some of these values has already been configured by installer. There is a lot of avaible options not needed for basic setting. After that, restart icecast :

sudo service icecast restart

Now, add a NAT rule to redirect external port (8000 by default) to your server. Then, copy an example of ezstream configuration :

cp /usr/share/doc/ezstream/examples/ezstream-minimal.xml .

and edit it (be careful, here end tag are crafted by my editor) :

<ezstream>

  <servers>
    <server>
      <hostname>127.0.0.1</hostname>
      <port>8000</port>
      <password>XXX</password>
    </server>
  </servers>

  <streams>
    <stream>
      <mountpoint>/stream.mp3</mountpoint>
      <format>MP3</format>
    </stream>
  </streams>

  <intakes>
    <intake>
      <filename>/media/MyTrack.mp3</filename>
      <stream_once>1</stream_once>
    </intake>
  </intakes>

</ezstream>

I choose to play track only once. If not set, it will be played indefinitely. Now, we can run ezstream :

ezstream -c ezstream-minimal.xml

On Windows, we can use VLC to read this stream by opening :

http://icecast.soutade.fr:8000/stream.mp3

This is a basic setup, but we can do a lot of more complex things by autogenerating config file and auto start ezsteram from a web frontend for example.