Stream types

The Radioplayer web player supports standard HTML5 audio playback, as well as HTTP streaming using HLS and MPEG-DASH. It handles fallback between streams, enabling the best streams to be served to each browser.

Supported formats

HTML5 audio

These streams are played using the browser's native audio support.

  • MP3, including Shoutcast/Icecast and on-demand/podcast content.
  • AAC, as above.

HTTP streaming

These modern streaming formats are higher-quality and more robust than older streams, and automatically handle bitrate negotiation and reconnection. These are played natively where supported, or otherwise load a media source extension for playback, if supported.

  • HLS - native on iOS, Safari and Edge. Oth1erwise uses HLS.js
  • MPEG-DASH - Uses DASH.js

MPEG-DASH streams support live rewind and seeking.

Stream configuration

In order for a stream to be available to the console, you must make sure that you have at least one stream that is available on the 'web'. When you add a stream to your station in Radioplayer Cloud, you can do this by either

  • Not adding a target platform to the stream at all (this means it's available 'everywhere')
  • Adding a platform of 'Web'

These streams will be returned by the Radioplayer APIs when the console is initialised.

If there are no streams available to the web then it will always use the fallback stream.

Stream fallback

The player allows several streams to be listed, which will be attempted in turn until one is playable. If an MPEG-DASH stream is available and supported, then that will be attempted first. Next, any HLS stream will be attempted, if supported. Other streams are then attempted in the order that they are listed in Radioplayer Cloud.

If no playable streams are found, then the player will retry several times before failing.