Livestreamer For Windows

Posted by Cirrus on February 16, 2015
Posted in: Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Capture

I figured i would write a tutorial for my Windows using brethren showing them the awesome livestreamer and how to go about installing and using this awesome bit of kit.  Livestreamer allows us to watch a number of streaming services in VLC or any media player you choose, which is great as it does away with the need for flash, those who bother to check out livestreamer will see a marked improvement in video quality and the RAM footprint and CPU cycles are drastically decreased in comparison to when using browser to view streams.
The Windows installer can be found here the installer includes a compiled version of Livestreamer (that does not require an existing Python installation) and RTMPDump for viewing RTMP streams. It will also generate a default config file all that requires editing is just the #player line, remove the # comment and point the player line to your players .exe like you see in my .livestreamerrc (line 12) it would also be wise to ensure the line rtmpdump= points to the newly installed rtmpdump .exe (line 19 on my .livestreamerrc)  the default directory for the .livestreamerrc is C:\Users\cirrus\AppData\Roaming\livestreamer.  Once you have done that, then that is us finished, easy huh?  now we want to find some sites which livestreamer has native plugins for, i will list a couple …

+ vaughnlive.tv

+ veetle

+ filmon

+ You Tube

To play the streams in Windows we open up the cygwin terminal (if installed) or the command prompt / powershell and simply type ..
livestreamer url of stream best
for example
livestreamer http://vaughnlive.tv/crimecentral best

The chosen stream will then open in your chosen media player.

Livestreamer is in my top 5 applications and it is multi platform so Linux OSX and Windows users can benefit, see here for more info on livestreamer .

I tend to watch the crime stream often so i created a .bat file by simply opening notepad, pasting in this one line

livestreamer http://vaughnlive.tv/crimecentral best

save file as crime.bat and viola we have just created a shortcut to that stream, that might be handy for those who don’t like command prompt or powershell.

Stream All The Things To Your Ipad

Posted by Cirrus on December 29, 2014
Posted in: blog. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

  2014-12-28-235730_1033x533_scrot2014-12-28-235642_1033x536_scrot

EDIT: I filed a bug with livestreamer dev due to streamlive.to having changed their URL syntax which now renders this post  obsolete.

This is just a quick tip i stumbled upon and i think ipad owners will approve.

Being a long time Android user i am new to the ipad, the ipad air 2 was under the tree so i set about tweaking it to my liking, on Android one of my favourite apk’s is the Dragon VLC Player  it allows me to stream all the popular TV shows and live sports to my Android tablet best of all it’s free on Android.

So i then set about finding this for the ipad, alas it is indeed for sale in the app store but before i shelled out the 8 quid for it i looked around, after some trial & error i installed oplayer from the app store then once installed i opened up oplayer’s settings and i changed the players built in browsers homepage to http://mobileonline.tv this gives oplayer the exact same functionality as the £8 Dragon VLC Player, allowing us to access ilive.to and stream all the things, one has to just click on the hls or rtmp url’s [desktop users can ofc use these url’s in VLC etc. ] and chosen stream will open in oplayer. I hope someone finds this as useful as i do.

Happy New Year

Mac Revisited

Posted by Cirrus on September 19, 2014
Posted in: blog, Hardware, Software, Tech. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

                                                                                                         1                     0800-comparison-3-1

                     Long time followers of this page may remember back in March of 2012 i did up a hackintosh on an old Dell 620, that was my first foray into the macworld and i came away not overly impressed, Snow Leopard reminded me of Gnome2. Recently i went back for another look at OS X after cooking up a hackintosh which runs the OS Mavericks,  read on to find out how this Archlinux refugee fared in the adventure.

                   Firstly i went to my favourite torrent site and searched for ‘ OSX USB Install Intel’  i ultimately came away with this .  For anyone wanting to follow my steps ( i will give a tutorial of sorts as one or two folk on G+ asked me to share the magic sauce) this would be a great time to go and find out what hardware your PC is running, If using lolWindows then there is a free app named Speccy and if using Linux then you probably know how to find out what hardware your box is using.  Specificaly take note of the Soundcard, GPU and the NIC (network interface card) make and model. My machine has an ASUS P6T SE mobo and an Intel i7 920 and an ATI HD4870 GPU  Audio is Realtek ALC888/ALC1200, NIC is RealtekRTL8111,  i will link to the appropriate kexts and a DSDT for that specific HW below.

Once i had my list of hardware i set about writing the newly downloaded image to a little 16Gb Sandisk USB stick, i was ofc using Linux so i used the ‘dd’ method.  Having formatted the USB stick to FAT32 filesystem i began to write the image, as root i cd to dir where image resides then ran this command replacing ** with the USB drive’s assigned letters

(never dd to /dev/S**1 etc. no partition numbers, always to root of device)

i renamed the downloaded file ‘OS X 10.9 Install USB.raw’ to simply osx10.raw

dd if=osx10.raw of dev/s**
  If using lolWindows use this to write the file to teh USB stick

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xcowsay MPD Now Playing

Posted by Cirrus on September 14, 2014
Posted in: General TechnoBabble, Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

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    Simple shell script for MPD now playing, using xcowsay to define image

(any image can be used)

                                                               .

#!/bin/bash
OSD=$(mpc current)
xcowsay --at 800,20 --font=CaviarDreams --monitor=1 --image=/home/cirrus/djtux.png "MPD Now Playing" "$OSD"

Download xcowmpd.sh Script

edit the –at switch to define where on VDU image shows

and ofc edit the –monitor switch to define which VDU

see here for moar indepth configuration options

To have the script execute on MPD song change,

add this 1 line to ~/.ncmpcpp/config

execute_on_song_change = ~/path/to/xcowmpd.sh

Alternatively if not using ncmpcpp simply execute this script alongside mpd,mcp [edit to suit]

                                                                     

Here is some more of my simple shell scripts where xcowsay could be used opposed to notify-send

Open Cubic Player

Posted by Cirrus on March 22, 2014
Posted in: blog, General TechnoBabble, Software, Tech. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments

Hi

Again ill be writing about yet another TUI application, which will run with or without an X server. Those who know me are aware i prefer to use the console where possible, not because i wanna be l33t but merely because i find it does things better, faster and in many cases opens up moar options/preferences than you get with the GUI counterparts.  My latest find started life in or around December of 1994 as a DOS binary-only freeware. Thankfully at the tail end of 2003 someone took the time and effort to port it to Linux, and other ‘Unix like’ Operating systems.

Open Cubic Player as mentioned will run in a TTY as well as in a graphical environment, here’s a few scrot’s of OCP

2014-03-22-174907_476x182_scrot         2014-03-22-174127_644x418_scrot

Both images above are from the ocp-X11  ( the graphical environment)  now it’s only fair i show you some scrots of OCP running in a non graphical environment.

2014-03-22-175327_954x515_scrot2014-03-22-174541_644x421_scrot

Using ocp-curses we dont get the same visualisations, only the spectrum analyzer, whereas in the X version we have choice ofaround 4 visualisations

Video of ocp-curses

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Radio Ga-Ga

Posted by Cirrus on March 3, 2014
Posted in: General TechnoBabble, Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment
  • Pyradio0Hi

I reckoned it’s about time i posted something here on my neglected corner of teh interwebs, this time ill be harping on about yet another TUI (Text User Interface) application named pyradio,  Yes it’s python and yes it’s a radio (remember those ?).   Sure we could write shell aliases to fire up our favourite radio stations/streams, however pyradio will save you the time and bother.  Get it here by typing/pasting

git clone https://github.com/coderholic/pyradio.git

into a shell, then cd into the newly downloaded directory and run this command to install itPyradio1

sudo python setup.py install

if that sounds too much like hard work you may be able to find it in your favourite repository

<—-Here’s what it looks like ..

If pyradio is for you and you have gone and installed it then i have taken the time to go and dig out some radio stream URL’s for you to add to the stations.csv file, which can be found in this directory

/usr/lib/python3.3/site-packages/pyradio/

should your distro be on an older version of python, maybe 2.7 then cd to

/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pyradio/

you get the gist,  paste the contents of Radio Stations  into the stations.csv file (you will need elevated priviliges to write to this directory).

I also edited the player.py file from the above directory and changed line 101 from mplayer to the much prefered mpv media player, for good measure i edited the radio.py file to change the default curses colours.

That’s all folks, Thanks for dropping by.

cirrus

UK Linux users, watch Live TV in VLC / mplayer

Posted by Cirrus on October 19, 2013
Posted in: Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 7 Comments

I came across this shell script & i thought it worth sharing, sadly it is only usable for those with a UK IP. It enables us to watch these UK TV channels in any external media player.

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First off you will need to head over to tvcatchup and sign up for a free account ( it takes only a few minutes ) then we head here for the shell script

As you see in lines 4 & 5 of script is where you enter your recently created username and password from tvcatchup.com, save the script as tv.sh to your home directory, make it executable and in terminal type ~/tv.sh you will see …

2013-10-19--1382205253_515x287_scrot

Pick teh corresponding number to channel you want to view and “thats all folks”

*shell script would prolly work in OSX, id urge any OSX users to test and let me know.

** you can ofc edit script to replace default VLC with your media player of choice.