HTTP deflate encoding support (RFC7230 §4.2.2)
We're very happy that VLC supports the Icecast directory at dir.xiph.org as a playlist source.
As we've moved dir.xiph.org to our own, OSUOSL hosted, server we've noticed something about many clients querying http://dir.xiph.org/yp.xml . Most client software sadly does not use compression as specified in RFC 2616, section 3.5. This leads to considerable amounts of unnecessary bandwidth consumption.
Currently the average throughput of dir.xiph.org is about 7 MBit/s, where most of it is due to yp.xml requests. When using gzip the transferred data drops by roughly a factor of 10. This means we could save OSUOSL probably around 6 Mbit/s of 24/7 egress traffic if most clients would implement this.
This brings us to VLC. We'd very much appreciate if you could enable this in VLC. Our statistics indicate that VLC accounts for over one third of requests for yp.xml. We have verified that the latest version as of ticket creation (2.0.3, about 20% of total hits to yp.xml) exhibits this behaviour too.
This would also benefit your users. Not everyone is on a high bandwidth connection, where 5 MByte are just a 'blip' to download. (current average size of yp.xml)
I had a brief look and it seems as if VLC already uses zlib, albeit only for its built in httpd.
For reference a related ticket on our side: https://trac.xiph.org/ticket/1890#comment:8
We're on freenode in #icecast and #xiph if you need to contact us.