Internet Radio

Yay, it has arrived!

With the release of the latest firmware branch Xtreamer introduced the "Internet Radio" feature. Requested by a lot of customers it finally made its way into the Xtreamer four months after its release. What can I say about the internet radio section? It's working! Isn't that what it's all about? :)

Custom radio stations

The first question you might ask is, does it support custom radio stations or only a selected list they provide. Good news for those of you who like Shoutcast radio stations. All MP3 and AAC+ streams should work out of the box. All you need to do is provide a .plsx file for the Xtreamer to open. What the heck is .plsx? No worries, if you have played around with radio playlists in .ini format (not those generated by Winamp) you might know the .pls fileformat which is quite simple.

.plsx format

To use your favorite Shoutcast radio station with Xtreamer you need to create a file with the extension .plsx and put the following content into it: 

[playlist]
File1=URL to your favorite radio station
Title1=Name of your favorite radio station
NumberOfEntries=1
Length1=-1
Version=2

Here is one concrete example:

[playlist]
File1=http://121.88.250.93:8380
Title1=KM STUDIO
NumberOfEntries=1
Length1=-1
Version=2

That should be all. After saving the file in a location of your choice (internal HDD, external HDD, USB stick, Samba/NFS share) you can browse to it and let Xtreamer open it. It should then display the message "Connecting server". Few seconds later you can enjoy your favorite station via the Xtreamer!

Tens of thousands of radio stations

As I like the radio feature a lot and am listening myself to Shoutcast stations nearly every day I created a PHP script to retrieve a few of them from the Shoutcast servers. The result was better than I thought, I expected only a few thousands of stations but ended up with tens of thousands of them. So here I'm gonna share them with you :) I published them in the official Xtreamer forum where you can download them and read, how you can manage to make them accessible in a convenient way.

Find the forum thread here: http://forum.xtreamer.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=5729