Serving a growing MP3 file?

[Anonymous]

On a server at work I have a cronjob that uses curl, against a streaming server, to record a program I would like to listen to, that starts before I get to work in the morning.

I use my laptop to listen to the program, and I carry the laptop between work and home. My laptop isn’t booted at work until after the program has started.

To listen to all of it unbroken, I currently have to wait until the recording completes, and then download it to my laptop.

Is it possible to use Firefly to serve out the growing mp3 file?

Thanx!

– Steinar

[fizze]

I guess thats not a problem.
The client will receive invalid duration tags and metadata, but that’s a given.
Transcoding happens live thru pipes (on some machines at least) and that works just as well. So technically it’s not a problem. 🙂

Just on a sidenote: I’ve been trying the same thing with a ogg-vorbis stream. This is tricky because it is split up in hundreds of metastreams, which most clients have troubles decoding, and transcoding is itchy also.

[Anonymous]

Well, I found a simple solution that doesn’t involve Firefly, or any other server software (except ssh), and may be of interest of others, so I’ll post it here.

I wrote a small C program called growcat, see below, that can be used in the following way:

(ssh server.name.com “/path/to/growcat /path/to/file/to/stream.mp3”) >localfile.mp3

The code of the program, is:

/*

* Read a file and output to standard out.  If the file ends,

* don't terminate, but instead hang, waiting for new input.

*/

#include 

#include 



main(int argc, const char* argv[]) {

/*

* The first arg, if any, is expected to be the input file name

* if there are no arguments, stdin is used as the input file.

*/

FILE* infile = stdin;

if (argc > 0) {

const char* filename = argv[1];

infile = fopen(filename, "r");

}



/*

* Loop forever, wait for a while when the end of the input

* file is reached.

*/

int bytecount = 0;

int oldbytecount = 0;

while(1) {

int c = fgetc(infile);

while (c != EOF) {

++bytecount;

fputc(c, stdout);

c = fgetc(infile);

}

/* EOF reached, first check if it has stopped growing */

if (oldbytecount == bytecount) {

/* file has stopped growing and EOF is reached.  Terminating! */

exit(0);

}

/* File is still growing, wait 10s and try again */

sleep(10);

oldbytecount = bytecount;

}

}

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