Icecast is free server software for streaming multimedia.

About Ezstream

Ezstream is a command line source client for Icecast media streaming servers. It began as the successor of the old “shout” utility, and has since gained a lot of useful features.

In its basic mode of operation, it streams media files or data from standard input without reencoding and thus requires only very little CPU resources. It can also use various external decoders and encoders to reencode from one format to another, and stream the result to an Icecast server. Additional features include scriptable playlist and metadata handling. All of its features make ezstream a very flexible source client.

Supported media formats for streaming are MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora. Native metadata support includes MP3 (ID3v1 only) and Ogg Vorbis, and many more formats when the optional TagLib support has been compiled in.

Ezstream is free software and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Download

Latest version: 0.6.0

• Source .tar.gz (all platforms)
  • ezstream-0.6.0.tar.gz
  • SHA256: f86eb8163b470c3acbc182b42406f08313f85187bd9017afb8b79b02f03635c9

Older releases

Older releases can be found at downloads.xiph.org/releases/ezstream.

The last official build for MS Windows is available here: ezstream-0.5.6-win32.zip (MD5: 19c6f28c2de81e6e2fa3e0ed914e6696).

Further Information

Dependencies

Ezstream depends on:

• libshout 2.2.x or later + libshout dependencies
• libxml 2.x

Ezstream optionally uses:

• For reading metadata from Ogg Vorbis files:
  • TagLib 1.x (1.4 or newer recommended) or
  • libvorbis 1.x
• For basic non-ASCII charset support in metadata and filenames:
  • GNU libiconv, if iconv() is not available in the system C library.

UNIX (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, …)

On UNIX and UNIX-like systems, such as Linux and *BSD, binary packages for the required libraries are usually available. To compile ezstream, ensure that the respective -devel packages are installed as well, if applicable. Further steps, and more, are explained in the README and INSTALL files inside the distribution package.
It might be a good idea to check whether the operating system vendor provides a binary package of a recent ezstream release and install that one instead of building from source.

MS Windows

Due to technical constraints, MS Windows is no longer a supported platform for ezstream. Unsupported builds of older versions of ezstream are still available, however.

Windows users can simply copy the ezstream.exe file from the binary distribution archive (.ZIP) to any location of their choosing. Users, who wish to be able to run ezstream anywhere on their system, can add the directory that contains ezstream.exe to their PATH environment variable.
The ezstream binary release depends on MSVC 2008 runtime libraries. These libraries can be downloaded from Microsoft as the vcredist_x86.exe file, at no cost.

Release Notes

Ezstream 0.6.0 has been released on January 18th 2015.

Version 0.6.0 is a security and maintenance release.

• This release contains a SECURITY FIX for a command injection vulnerability that was found and reported by Alexandre Rebert:

  The previous handling of metadata placeholders allowed for arbitrary shell commands to be trivially injected and executed as the ezstream user, via malicious media files.

  This vulnerability depends on both a configuration using metadata placeholders and the user streaming media files from untrusted sources without noticing `commands` or $(commands) in artist or title fields.

  While the group of actually affected users may be limited, all users are advised to upgrade.

• This release requires existing users to ADJUST their CONFIGURATION:

  To protect against the injection vulnerability above, metadata is now properly quoted and escaped from the shell. This means that any extra quoting must be removed from configuration files.

  Remove all quoting from metadata placeholders in <encode/> and <decode/> commands, e.g. replace "@M@" with @M@, and "@T@" with @T@, etc. Without these changes, stream metadata will look both wrong and the injection vulnerability may be re-introduced.

  Configuration examples have been adjusted accordingly.

Changes

• src/ezstream.c:
  • FIX: Prevent certain characters from being interpreted by the shell.
  • FIX: Prevent ezstream from entering an infinite loop when stopping to send data to standard input. From gquintard. (Ticket #2045)
• various:
  • NEW: Add new <metadata_refreshinterval/> feature from Matthew Adams (with minor changes plus documentation.) This allows for recurring and custom metadata updates in between song changes via <metadata_progname/>.
  • NEW: Add new command line option -m to disable any active metadata updates. Idea from Richard Thomas. (Ticket #1620)

Support

Reporting Problems

In case of problems with ezstream, please make sure to re-read the documentation first and double-check your configuration. A lot of effort has been put into the ezstream(1) manual, and it should – at least in theory – answer all questions.

Of course, ezstream isn’t immune to bugs. After checking if your bug is already known, or a newer ezstream release fixes your problem, it is much appreciated that you file your bug report with the Xiph.org bug tracker.

Please be as specific and verbose as necessary when submitting a problem report. Also, please include a valid e-mail address when reporting an issue, in case there are follow-up questions.

Your contribution and efforts are very much appreciated. Thank you!

Contact

The current maintainer of ezstream is Moritz Grimm (mgrimm at mrsserver dot net).