Duplicate listeners from onlineradiostations.com

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Greetings All,

So I got our internet radio station listed with onlineradiostations.com which lists radio stations from all over the world.  They use an embedded Windows Media Player to play our stream, which in turn shows up as Nemesis Player x.x. on the 'View Current Listeners' in CentovaCast. 

However, I've noticed that about half the time, listeners that connect to our stream via that website will play duplicate streams.  It will show duplicate IP Addresses but the User Agent will be Mozilla x.x for one and Nemesis Player x.x for the second.  The Listen Time will be about 1-2 secs apart between the two.

As you know, this is a big issue because it unnecessarily runs up the bandwidth for one listener. 

When listeners connect to our stream via our website, the User Agent is always Mozilla x.x (or AppleCore for Macs) because our Broadcast Player is built with jPlayer which uses HTML5 native browser support with jQuery and a flash fallback for unsupported browsers.  Anyway, when listeners connect via our website, it's never duplicated.

I've tried contacting the people at onlineradiostations.com regarding this issue, but they have lousy tech support since I have not heard from them back.  Has anyone else experienced this issue?  Any comments would be appreciated.  Thanks.
If they're showing up and remaining in the current listeners list for more than a second or two, then you've definitely got two distinct connections coming in from the client.  That's represent a problem of some sort with the player itself... unfortunately there's not much you can do about that from the server side -- it has to be resolved in the player itself.

Thanks. I finally got a response from them saying they don't seem to know the problem either.  I've noticed that when I insert the raw mp3 URL stream directly into my Windows Media Player, it does not duplicate.  It may have to do with the fact that the Windows Media Player is embedded within their website, perhaps that's whats causing it to duplicate for some people, myself included. 
I think I may have found the culprit. See below my response to onlineradiostations.com

After doing some research myself, this may be an issue with the way you guys have embedded the windows media player within your website.  I've noticed that the duplicate sessions only occur for me when I use Google Chrome and Firefox.  However it does not occur when I use Internet Explorer 8.  It appears that both the embedded player and the browsers Chrome and Firefox are downloading the stream.

I found this topic online with what may be a solution or at least can get your developers on the right path to resolving this issue.  I hope you guys can get this fixed! Thanks.

http://icecast.imux.net/viewtopic.php?t=1444
Last Edit: March 14, 2012, 07:47:16 am by Remix Radio