Hi,

I want to listen to live streams on a site that is very picky towards the player that is used. With Totem I got a warning and also with Amarok. The site wants to protect its bandwidth and the administrator of the site told me he doesn't care about the program used as long as the player doesn't uses all its bandwith (by filling its buffer) or gives the impression the stream is being illegally downloaded.

So I'd like to know how Amarok (or/and Totem) download streams and want to know if the buffer is completely filled before listening or does it download the stream during listening in small pieces like winamp.
I hope someone can answer this rather technical question.
The site uses mp3pro streams

What a load of bull, really. Don't buy into any of that nonsense. What this "administrator" said makes no sense technically at all.

(Amarok is known to eat little children though, but please don't tell him.)

Mark Kretschmann wrote:What a load of bull, really. Don't buy into any of that nonsense. What this "administrator" said makes no sense technically at all.

(Amarok is known to eat little children though, but please don't tell him.)

Hmm.. eat little children? That is a really nasty bug, someone should enter a bug report  

Well, it could be the admin is not technically very savvy and thinks this is the case. Maybe if you give some more information how it works I can convince the admin there is no problem. He claims iTunes is an example of a program that fills the buffer and uses a lot of bandwidth.
I'm pretty sure he just wants to protect his bandwidth and wants to avoid legal problems . The guy is doing a great job by sharing some amazing stuff that is not to be found somewhere else.
If Amarok could present / disguise  itself as xmms or winamp perhaps that could help as well.

I totally agree with Mark.
As long as streamings do not use RTSP (and there you can set the buffer size), they will mainly use TCP and there's no buffering there, just downloading (like a webpage) which will take care that bandwidth is distributed fairly between all streams.

every player has to fill a buffer to some extent, that's how streaming works. Sounds like he needs to take a look at the load balancing on his end.