Setting online radio player to play stream without downloading the playlist

Question

I have a created an online radio station using icecast2 and edcast....

When i connect to the server with the the url "mysite:8000/stream.m3u" the browser first downloads the .m3u playlist and then we have to open it with our desired player.

I've also seen some sites where you just click on the play button of the player embedded in the page and the player automatically starts playing the stream... The process of recieving and playing the playlist is invisible to the user...

Can anyone tell me how this can be done...??

Thanks a lot for your time.....

Answer 1

Well... Found out how to do it... Was rather simple...

You just have to embed a player (like Winamp or Windows media player, VLC) etc in your webpage that's going to play the radio.... But the player should installed already on the client machine for this to work...

Or you can use a flash player so that it you can provide the service to anyone who has adobe flash player plugin installed with his or her browser.... (which i believe is near 100% at this age of youtube and metacafe...!!)...

For example, there is this very nice, impressive flash plugin called XSPF Web Music Player... You can find it here.... http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/

For embedding the player to your webpage you use the tag as follows...

That's it.. You're done if you have configured your icecast and edcast servers..!!!