Streaming audio - where to start?

Question

I need to develop an embedded audio streaming server.

Requirements:

• Voice quality or better
• Intended for low power wifi transmission
• Broad support in existing software and devices (ie, windows media player, quicktime, vlc, iPhone, Android, etc).
• Royalty/patent free, or cheap to license

Preferences:

• Low overhead TCP/IP based streaming protocol
• Voice grade codec (easy to implement in software, no DSP, 32bit CPU if needed)
• Would be nice if it supported HTML5 browsers, but is there any codec (such as raw) that is supported by the latest browsers that is lower overhead than MP3?

Therefore:

• What are the relevant streaming protocols I should be looking at?
• What are the relevant codecs I should be looking at?
• What transport streams should I be looking at?
• What am I missing, or where else should I be looking for this type of need?

Answer 1

The easiest route would be to wrap the iPhone 3G S' hardware accelerated AAC codec in some sort of standard network stream; I think it's royalty free. For broad support, your best option is MP3 over HTTP shoutcast-style (not royalty free).