watching live olympics on linux
Using NBC
I was originally excited because NBC was going to use YouTube for live streaming because YouTube works fairly well under linux. When I logged into my Comcast account, NBC just continued to ask me to log in. Apparently many other Linux users faced a similar problem. I eventually figured out that Linux Mint 13 XFCE works completely fine and has no problems. So I had to look for alternatives.
I spent a couple hours trying to figure out why nbcolympics.com worked fine under Mint 13 and got nowhere. I installed the mint-flashplugin-11 package on my Arch desktop – nothing.
Well, I found out what was wrong. Flash requires I have hal running,
which needed to be installed from the AUR. A reddit comment linked to a
blog which linked to this Adobe help
page
saying so. Now NBC streaming works.
Using BBC
Then I came across this reddit
post
which then led me to this tunlr forum
post.
This required me to change my resolv.conf to have these:
nameserver 64.250.122.104
nameserver 199.167.30.144
Then on that same page, it was suggested to set resolv.conf to be
immutable, ie:
sudo chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf
Just need to remember to set it to -i when done. Now I am able to go
to the BBC
website and view
the streams.
BBC on my TV
To view a video in MPlayer is kind of a big deal for me since then I can
easily put the video on my television. I was lucky enough to come across
this mailing list post for get_iplayer
and found this does exactly what I want.
To watch it in MPlayer, I just run the following command:
get_iplayer --pid p00w2t4c --stdout --nowrite | mplayer -cache 512 -
The pid comes from the last part of the url when you go to any of the
streams on the BBC’s website.
This means I can watch the Olympics live on my television.
I would still like to figure out how to get the NBC 720p streams on my TV and without all the ads. Until then, I think I may favor the BBC stream since it gives me exactly what I want to see.