I’ve been thoroughly testing Orb for my forthcoming, multiplatform (Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile) Multimedia Bible, of which I’ve already published several chapters (see http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index. ... g=3&cat=55 if interested).

I very much like the capabilities of the program. HOWEVER, you will REALLY want to consider adding MP3 or, even better, HE-AAC (v2) streaming support over SHOUTcast / Icecast (that is, “simple” HTTP). Why? There are quite a few reasons for this:

- If you add HE-AAC v2 (NOT simply HE-AAC or, even worse, AAC-LC!) support, then, the mobile clients will be able to stream stereo, 44 kHz contents at 24 kbps at very good quality.

Yes, that’s right: 24 kbps. I’m not lying / exaggerating! It’s WAY better than anything else; for example, way better than the 32 kbps, mono, 44 kHz streams WMA streams default to with GPRS. Furthermore, HE-AAC v2 is compatible with all major mobile platforms (Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile), as is also explained in my articles.

- On platforms not supporting WMA streaming (for example, Symbian), adding any kind of HTTP + MP3 and/or AAC support would be the ONLY way to stream from Orb in NAT’ed environments – that is, the majority of the current mobile data networks.

Currently, no mobile RealOne players support HTTP transfer (except for the Mplayer port on Windows mobile, but it’s a real CPU hog: only works on 624 MHz Xscale CPU’s and chews through the battery in no time), which means they have to support RTSP. This, however, means they can’t be used in NAT’ed / firewalled environments like the majority of today’s mobile networks.

The same stands for 3G technologies (AMR, AAC etc.) currently implemented by Orb: they only support RTSP, NOT HTTP. (AAC could be streamed over HTTP - after all, SHOUTcast does exactly the same.)

Note that this is completely unrelated to the previous point (that is, further lowering the bitrate by employing HE-AAC v2).

Finally, note that the Winamp PLS transfers are, internally, Windows Media files. That is, they aren’t HTTP-based MP3/Ogg/AAC SHOUTcast streams.

Thanks so much for your detailed post, here!

It turns out that Orb already supports the streaming schemas you mention (for example, we already use MP3 streaming over http for the iPhone) but we don't necessarily expose such choices or use all schemas for all devices, or provide streaming settings per device.

Good thoughts and suggestions, which we will take into account in our roadmapping.

Thanks again; our engineers will post updated information as more features come online to expose those capabilities.

And Happy Holidays!

Herve Utheza
VP & GM
Orb

Thanks for the answer - this is certainly very good news!

I'll try to mod the User-Agent of my mobile browsers so that they report themselves as the iPhone Safari browser (if that's how you decide what to do).

Otherwise, when do you plan to add this streaming mode as an explicitly selectable mode for other mobile platforms?

Finally, will you add HE-AAC v2 support? Unfortunately, VLC (the other notable transcoder) doesn't support it either.

I've played with rewriting the U-A header (to "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3") so that my devices behave as Safari on iPhone. The Orb server correctly recognizes them as iPhones.

However, it, now, returns 3GP/RTSP URL's (like rtsp://myip:554/48A6EBA836390CF5/52/O!L ... 0/live.3gp) inside the SDP file (stream.sdp) it returns, which in no way will work in a firewalled / NAT'ed environment.

Are you sure you use HTTP to stream MP3 to iPhone clients?

Hi Menneisyys,

Thanks for this valuable information.

Yes, we use mp3 over http to stream to the iphone, but we use the quicktime plugin directly instead of a PLS file (using the embed tag), so it will not work if your device doesn't support the quicktime plugin.
Also note that you will need to clear your cookies before switching the user-agent of your device, otherwise the stream settings won't be reset correctly.

We can add a mp3 over http inside PLS to the streaming options, it's already supported by our encoding engine in the latest version of Orb. However symbian phones don't seem to handle the PLS format, do you know a way to stream that format from the nokia browser?

We don't currently support HE-AAC v2, but we'll look into it.

They did change when I changed the U-A settings - that is, I saw an iPhone-specific GUI / settings on my WinMob devicd.



PLS files (with a proper SHOUTcast MP3 / AAC source) are already supported by Nokia Internet Radio and, hopefully, when it's finally released, the signed version of CorePlayer 1.2.



Great news

BTW, did you notice http://forums.orb.com/viewtopic.php?t=9308 ? Comments, feedback are welcome