Similarly, the Shoutcast homepage doesn't mention any codecs beyond MP3 and AAC ("up to 320 kbps"). The Icecast homepage says "Ogg (Vorbis and Theora), Opus, WebM and MP3", without mentioning AAC at all, which is one of the most popular codecs today. The exact list of codecs that are supported by Icecast and Shoutcast is somewhat nebulous. A list of differences between Icecast and Icecast-KH is available here. As a result, Icecast-KH has become the defacto Icecast server used by most streaming hosting companies. Over the years, this branch has served as a test bed for new Icecast features, and due to author's closer collaboration with industry, many of these features were built at the request of stream hosting providers. There's one twist - In 2012, Karl Heyes forked a branch of Icecast called Icecast-KH, to overhaul some of the internals and multithreaded performance, as well as add some experimental features like listener authentication. In 2004, Icecast 2 brought improved metadata support, compatibility with Shoutcast clients, and more advanced configuration options, which were features that lead to widespread adoption in the internet radio community.
Icecast was first released in 1999 as an open source alternative to proprietary and patent-encumbered streaming audio technologies of the day, which included both RealAudio and Shoutcast. (An even bigger opportunity came Winamp's way a year later, with the release of Napster, which propelled compressed audio technology into ubiquity.) By combining high bitrates and better compression, higher quality audio streaming was possible with the MP3 codec, and Nullsoft was quick to jump on this opportunity and create an ecosystem where Shoutcast could serve internet radio streams and Winamp could play those streams. This occurred right at the beginning of broadband adoption in the Western world, at a time when bandwidth was beginning to become less constrained and the average modem speed was creeping beyond 56K. The key differentiator of Shoutcast was that it streamed MP3 compressed audio instead of RealAudio's proprietary codecs. In 1998, during a time when Winamp was gaining popularity as MP3 player software, Nullsoft created Shoutcast (DNAS) as a competitor to RealAudio, the dominant audio and video streaming technology of the day. The history of Icecast and Shoutcast goes back to the early days of internet radio. In this article, we compare the two most popular streaming servers, Icecast and Shoutcast, and explore which one might be right for you.
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