All the "stream" needs to do is yield an .m3u "file" with the stream URL. Not very complicated...
Not entirely true.
With the original setup, the m3u contains an url with port 8001, served by a streamproxy, which connects to the webif (again), this time on port 80, with a stream request.
This request returns the stream parameters, and the streamproxy starts streaming.
A couple of days ago I've looked at how I could add streaming support to the webif, but found that it would take a lot of work to allow convertor/source elements to be used by the webif.
And the original streaming mechanism relies on that.
So instead, I decided to add direct stream support to e2, on port 8001.
Perhaps everybody should pull our recent internal e2 streamserver support.
This makes the job of the webif a lot easier, indeed, just provide an m3u with the stream url (or instead, why not a direct link to the 8001 url?)