Delay a Shoutcast stream by 12 hours (Linux/bash)

Question

I am living on the other side of the world from my home (GMT+1 now, GMT+13 is home), and I miss my old terrestrial radio station. It has a Shoutcast stream, and I would like to simply delay it by 12 hours so that it is always available when I want to listen to it, in a way that would make its timezone be synchronised to my timezone.

I envision this as a script being run on my server host.

A naive approach would simply be to allocate enough ram in a ringbuffer to store the entire 12 hour delay, and pipe in the output from streamripper. But the stream is a 128kbps mp3, which would mean (128/8) * 60 * 60 = ~56MB per hour, or 675MB for the whole 12 hour buffer, which isn't really so practical. Plus, i might have to deal with my server host just killing the process after a certain timeout.

So, what are some strategies that might actually be practical?

Answer 1

A stream ripper would be the Easy way, and probably the Right way, but if you want to do it the Programmer way....

• Most development machines have quite a bit of RAM. Are you SURE you can't spare 675 MB?
• Rather than store the output in a buffer can't you store it in a file or files(s), say an hour at a time? (essentially, you would be writing your own stream ripper)
• Convert the stream to a lower bitrate, if you can tolerate the loss in quality

Answer 2

Why don't you just download it with a stream ripper like Ripshout or something?

Answer 3

to answer my own question, here's a script that starts up as a cron job every 30 minutes. it dumps the incoming stream in 5-minute chunks (or set by FILE _ SECONDS ) to a particular directory. block borders are synchronised to the clock, and it doesn't start writing until the end of the current time chunk, so the running cronjobs can overlap without doubling up data or leaving gaps. files are named as (epoch time % number of seconds in 24 hours).str .

i haven't made a player yet, but the plan was to set the output directory to somewhere web-accessible, and write a script to be run locally that uses the same timestamp-calculating code as here to sequentially access (timestamp 12 hours ago).str, tack them back together again, and then set up as a shoutcast server locally. then i could just point my music player at http://localhost:port and get it.

edit: New version with timeouts and better error condition checking, plus nice log file. this is currently running hitch-free on my (cheap) shared webhost, with no problems.

#!/usr/bin/python
import time
import urllib
import datetime
import os
import socket

# number of seconds for each file
FILE_SECONDS = 300

# run for 30 minutes
RUN_TIME = 60*30

# size in bytes of each read block
# 16384 = 1 second
BLOCK_SIZE = 16384

MAX_TIMEOUTS = 10

# where to save the files
OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = "dir/"
# URL for original stream
URL = "http://url/path:port"

debug = True
log = None
socket.setdefaulttimeout(10)

class DatestampedWriter:

    # output_path MUST have trailing '/'
    def __init__(self, output_path, run_seconds ):
        self.path = output_path
        self.file = None
        # needs to be -1 to avoid issue when 0 is a real timestamp
        self.curr_timestamp = -1
        self.running = False
        # don't start until the _end_ of the current time block
        # so calculate an initial timestamp as (now+FILE_SECONDS)
        self.initial_timestamp = self.CalcTimestamp( FILE_SECONDS )
        self.final_timestamp = self.CalcTimestamp( run_seconds )
        if debug:
            log = open(OUTPUT_DIRECTORY+"log_"+str(self.initial_timestamp)+".txt","w")
            log.write("initial timestamp "+str(self.initial_timestamp)+", final "+str(self.final_timestamp)+" (diff "+str(self.final_timestamp-self.initial_timestamp)+")\n")

        self.log = log

    def Shutdown(self):
        if self.file != None:
            self.file.close()

    # write out buf
    # returns True when we should stop
    def Write(self, buf):
        # check that we have the correct file open

        # get timestamp
        timestamp = self.CalcTimestamp()

        if not self.running :
            # should we start?
            if timestamp == self.initial_timestamp:
                if debug:
                    self.log.write( "starting running now\n" )
                    self.log.flush()
                self.running = True

        # should we open a new file?
        if self.running and timestamp != self.curr_timestamp:
            if debug:
                self.log.write( "new timestamp "+str(timestamp)+"\n" )
                self.log.flush()
            # close old file
            if ( self.file != None ):
                self.file.close()
            # time to stop?
            if ( self.curr_timestamp == self.final_timestamp ):
                if debug:
                    self.log.write( " -- time to stop\n" )
                    self.log.flush()
                self.running = False
                return True
            # open new file
            filename = self.path+str(timestamp)+".str"
            #if not os.path.exists(filename):
            self.file = open(filename, "w")
            self.curr_timestamp = int(timestamp)
            #else:
                # uh-oh
            #   if debug:
            #       self.log.write(" tried to open but failed, already there\n")
            #   self.running = False

        # now write bytes
        if self.running:
            #print("writing "+str(len(buf)))
            self.file.write( buf )

        return False

    def CalcTimestamp(self, seconds_offset=0):
        t = datetime.datetime.now()
        seconds = time.mktime(t.timetuple())+seconds_offset
        # FILE_SECONDS intervals, 24 hour days
        timestamp = seconds - ( seconds % FILE_SECONDS )
        timestamp = timestamp % 86400
        return int(timestamp)


writer = DatestampedWriter(OUTPUT_DIRECTORY, RUN_TIME)

writer_finished = False

# while been running for < (RUN_TIME + 5 minutes)
now = time.mktime(datetime.datetime.now().timetuple())
stop_time = now + RUN_TIME + 5*60
while not writer_finished and time.mktime(datetime.datetime.now().timetuple())<stop_time:

    now = time.mktime(datetime.datetime.now().timetuple())

    # open the stream
    if debug:
        writer.log.write("opening stream... "+str(now)+"/"+str(stop_time)+"\n")
        writer.log.flush()
    try:
        u = urllib.urlopen(URL)
    except socket.timeout:
        if debug:
            writer.log.write("timed out, sleeping 60 seconds\n")
            writer.log.flush()
        time.sleep(60)
        continue
    except IOError:
        if debug:
            writer.log.write("IOError, sleeping 60 seconds\n")
            writer.log.flush()
        time.sleep(60)
        continue
        # read 1 block of input
    buf = u.read(BLOCK_SIZE)

    timeouts = 0
    while len(buf) > 0 and not writer_finished and now<stop_time and timeouts<MAX_TIMEOUTS:
        # write to disc
        writer_finished = writer.Write(buf)

        # read 1 block of input
        try:
            buf = u.read(BLOCK_SIZE)
        except socket.timeout:
            # catch exception but do nothing about it
            if debug:
                writer.log.write("read timed out ("+str(timeouts)+")\n")
                writer.log.flush()
            timeouts = timeouts+1

        now = time.mktime(datetime.datetime.now().timetuple())
    # stream has closed,
    if debug:
        writer.log.write("read loop bailed out: timeouts "+str(timeouts)+", time "+str(now)+"\n")
        writer.log.flush()
    u.close();
    # sleep 1 second before trying to open the stream again
    time.sleep(1)

    now = time.mktime(datetime.datetime.now().timetuple())

writer.Shutdown()