Wednesday, July 13, 2011

procedure to change over to live broadcast

On stream.radiosai.org I have created services 8002, 8002live, 8020 and 8020live in addition to the services for the other streams. Batch files
c:\startlive.bat and c:\stoplive.bat do the work of
net stop 8002
sleep 5
net start 8002live
etc
(similarly for the 8020 stream, and similarly for stoplive)

Shortcuts on desktop for these bat files have been created. So, one minute before the live broadcast is to start, like 4.29 pm for the evening programme, just login with Remote Desktop and double-click on the respective icon.

To stop live, wait 70 seconds after the ending point - usually the Jaikar after Arati - and double-click the stoplive bat file. The BUTT has to be running during these 70 seconds too. This is because of buffering of the stream by the Shoutcast servers.

Edit: Initially we experimented with using Scheduled Tasks to automate the changeover, at least for the startlive which was a fixed time. But Scheduled Tasks don't run if the password is changed, and then we would also have issues when DST kicked in. So, decided manual change-over was better. And the next day the manual change-over came in useful when we had a long power outage at the Studio and could not change to live till 50 minutes into the morning session - recorded filler was played on air at that time.

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