Overview

This is quite a complicated set of applications, which when used together allow the Echo to stream music from a NAS within the house.

The main problem the Echo has when it comes to playing media, is that it expect all of the media to be in the cloud - so you have two options really - put your media in the cloud, or make the Echo think your media server is just another internet radio station.

The Applications

Icecast provides internet radio style streams (several channels).
EZStream provides icecast with a continual stream of files to play (for each channel).
Web Server allows different files to be selected for each channel.
Echo Connects to an app (deejay) and requests a channel.
This results in a connection to an HTTPS server to get an M3U file for the stream.
The Echo then connects to the stream locally.

Setup DeeJay App (internet)

Setup IceCast (locally)

Setup EZStream (locally)

SetupFFMPEG Relay (locally)

FFMPEG is useful to relay sound from webcams, and make them appear as another radio stream.  It extracts the audio stream data and sends it to a FIFO, which can then be accessed by EZStream just like any other MP3 file.


I use it to relay the audio from a garden bird-box, so we can listen to the chicks on the Echo, using deejay channel 4!.

Note that this example is for a specific webcam, and other webcams will have a different format url.  You can explore the capabilities with ffprobe, read the documentation, or look behind the scenes at any on-camera web server to try to identify the protocols / ports etc.




Setup Media Management Web Server (locally)

Setup HTTPS M3U Server (internet)

https://www.vizier.uk/deejay/stream.pl?address=192.168.1.3:8000/channel4