This blog is now live at simonsmess.com

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Watching Sopcast & TvAnts on Ubuntu !!!

It's Shangaï Master's time ( Gooooo Gasquet ;-) ), and while blogging, surfing, and whatelse, I wanted to watch the tennis game on my newly configured Ubuntu Gutsy box !
Of course Sopcast and TVAnts are THE P2P programs to watch television right now, so this is the way I went !

First thing firt, you need to install the standard Windows codec, because they don't come defacto with the Gutsy installation. A really good tutorial on the official site here, and look for "Playing Restricted Formats".

For TVAnts the installation is straight forward. You need to install Wine, the windows emulator. Then you download the regular Windows setup file and run it with the previously installed Wine. Apparently it needs a rebbot for Wine to add the shortcut to the faked "Windows Programs". After that you just need to add a channel or select one from the list, and open MPlayer or VLC on the url given by the program, which is usually something like http://localhost:8900/1.asf.


For SopCast, it's not as simple
. Unfortunately the gui does not really seem to work at the moment. So you need to install the command line util. You can download it from their website, and unzip it on your machine. It has a dependency over libstdc++5 which you can install from the package manager. Once this is done, you need to issue a command line of the like :
./sp-sc-auth sop://myserver/mychannel 3908 6908 >/dev/null &
3908 is the port that will connect to the server, 6908 is the port that will have the video, >/dev/null is to prevent the verbose output, and & to make the process run standalone which is obviously optional. Once this is done, you need to wait a little bit for the data to buffer (look at you systray and the network monitor), and then start your preferred player on the http://localhost:6908/tv.asf URL.

And there you go ! P2P Television enabled on your delighted Gutsy Ubuntu box !

If you have any problems, or need more information, don't hesitate to ask !

5 comments:

Sebz said...

Grrreaaaaato !

I was waiting for you to come out with something on that topic :)

And you did !!

Thanks dude :P

I'll test that asap.

Unknown said...

Great how-to thanks. I use this page every weekend now!

Simon said...

Glad I could be of any help ... Watch the blog and the post continue live here : http://www.simonsmess.com/tv/watching-sopcast-tvants-on-ubuntu/#comment-51

Unknown said...

You can use gtk-sopcast or qsopcast as the gui for sopcast. It makes it much easier.

With qsopcast you can configure firefox to handle the sopcast links too.

Stavros said...

Great piece of work... I will try it.