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TVCatchup script

With the World Cup approaching, I found it really annoying that there is no good way of watching live TV on N900 in the UK. Recorded content works well on iPlayer in the pop-out window, but live TV does not.

The obvious alternative is to use TVCatchup, who provide a lighter stream for the iPhone. N900 cannot play these streams out of the box because they use some non-standard playlist format, so I wrote a simple shell script that extracts the video stream and plays it with mplayer. For the script to work, you'll also need Firefox because I couldn't find a way to tell the built-in browser not to send the playlist to the Media Player.

Save this script as /home/user/tvcatchup.sh:

Code:

#!/bin/sh

dldir=/var/tmp

catchupdir=/home/user/.catchup

initialwait=1

buffer=1

wgetopts=""

mplayeropts=""





note()

{

/usr/bin/dbus-send --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.Notifications /org/freedesktop/Notifications org.freedesktop.Notifications.SystemNoteInfoprint string:"$1"

echo $1

}



download()

{

rm tmp*.ts

count=0

urlbase=`tail -1 $dldir/playlist.m3u8 | cut -d "/" -f 1-5`

echo Base URL: $urlbase

while [ 1 ]

        do

        wget $wgetopts -T10 `tail -1 $dldir/playlist.m3u8` -O url

        urlold=$url

        url=`tail -1 url`

        if [[ "$url" == "$urlold" ]] 

                then

                sleep 1

                else

                if [[ "`echo $url | cut -c1-4`" != "http" ]]

                        then

                        url2=$urlbase/$url

                        else

                        url2=$url

                        fi

                wget $wgetopts -T10 $url2 -O tmp$count.ts

                bytes=`wc -c < tmp$count.ts`

                echo "$count: Downloaded $bytes bytes"

                if [ "$bytes" == "0" ]

                        then

                        echo $url2

                        echo Retrying

                        else

                        count=`expr $count + 1`

                        fi

                fi

        sleep 1

done

}



play()

{

count=0

while [ 1 ]

        do

        countnext=`expr $count + $buffer`

        while [ ! -e tmp$countnext.ts ]

                do

                sleep 1

                done

        cat tmp$count.ts 

        rm tmp$count.ts

        count=`expr $count + 1`

        done

}



rm $dldir/playlist.m3u8

echo Starting browser

sleep 1

/usr/bin/dbus-send --system --type=method_call --dest=com.nokia.osso_browser /com/nokia/osso_browser/request com.nokia.osso_browser.load_url string:"http://iphone.tvcatchup.com"

note "Choose the channel"

while [ ! -e $dldir/playlist.m3u8 ]

        do

        sleep 1

        done

note "Playlist file found - Buffering"

mkdir 2>/dev/null $catchupdir

cd $catchupdir

download &

while [ ! -e "$catchupdir/tmp$initialwait.ts" ]

        do

        sleep 3

        killall 2>/dev/null mediaplayer

        note "Initial buffering"

        done

killall 2>/dev/null mediaplayer

note "Starting mplayer - Please be patient!"

rm tvfifo.ts

mkfifo tvfifo.ts

play > tvfifo.ts &

mplayer $mplayeropts -fs -hardframedrop -ao pulse -cache 4096 -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts fast tvfifo.ts

""rm -r $catchupdir

exit

You should now be able to find the TV Catchup icon (just the plain blue square) in your menu. When you click it, it opens Firefox and takes you to the TVCatchup iPhone page, where you can choose the channel you want to watch. Firefox will ask you what you want to do with playlist.m3u8. You'll need to save it to /home/user/MyDocs/.documents, which I believe is the default location. Once you have saved that file, close Firefox, and you can see in the terminal window how it starts to buffer the stream. After a while MPlayer should start playing it.

This is very experimental, so I won't give any guarantees, but it works on my phone. You need at least Mplayer and Firefox, and possibly something else too. There is a lot of room for improvement, so if anyone with more skill and experience wants to develop this further, I would encourage them to do so.

EDIT: There is now a low quality stream available on the tvcatchup.com website, which works fine on N900. However, the quality is a bit lower, so this script may still be of use. Updated the script so that it no longer needs Firefox. It runs in fullscreen mode now - press q to exit. To install, save the attached tarball and run

Code:

tar -xzvf tvcatchup.tar.gz -C /home/user

in the terminal. You need to have wget installed (thanks [DarkGUNMAN] - see post #19 for details).

Re: TVCatchup script

would be awesome if someone could package this up as a single download and install am really looking forward to world cup and this would be great

Re: TVCatchup script

or is it possible for you to post some step by step instructions on this cheers mate

Re: TVCatchup script

ddwwf1, if you work through the above post, you should find that it works fine.

Give it a go.

Re: TVCatchup script

Followed the steps, and tried running the Tvcatchup App (well the shortcut created). Terminal launches but closes almost straight away.

I've tried running /home/user/tvcatchup.sh
manually in terminal but I get a permission denied...

Quote:

Originally Posted by arajantie (Post 683112)

Code:

#!/bin/sh

download()

{

rm tmp*.ts

count=0

urlbase=`tail -1 $dldir/playlist.m3u8 | cut -d "/" -f 1-5`

echo Base URL: $urlbase

while [ 1 ]

        do

        wget -q `tail -1 $dldir/playlist.m3u8` -O /tmp/test

        urlold=$url

        url=`tail -1 /tmp/test`

        if [[ "$url" == "$urlold" ]] 

                then

                sleep 1

                else

                if [[ "`echo $url | cut -c1-4`" != "http" ]]

                        then

                        url2=$urlbase/$url

                        else

                        url2=$url

                        fi

                wget -q $url2 -O tmp$count.ts

                echo $count: Downloaded `wc -c < tmp$count.ts` bytes

                count=`expr $count + 1`

                fi

        sleep 1

done

}



play()

{

count=0

while [ 1 ]

        do

        countnext=`expr $count + 2`

        while [ ! -e tmp$countnext.ts ]

                do

                sleep 1

                done

        cat tmp$count.ts 

        rm tmp$count.ts

        count=`expr $count + 1`

        done

}



dldir=/home/user/MyDocs/.documents

rm $dldir/playlist.m3u8

echo Starting Firefox

/usr/bin/dbus-send --print-reply --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.Notifications /org/freedesktop/Notifications org.freedesktop.Notifications.SystemNoteDialog string:"Choose the channel, SAVE the playlist, and CLOSE Firefox!" uint32:0 string:'note'

fennec http://iphone.tvcatchup.com

if [ ! -e $dldir/playlist.m3u8 ]

        then

        No playlist file!

        exit

        fi

catchupdir=/tmp/catchup

mkdir $catchupdir

cd $catchupdir

echo Buffering

download &

pid1=$!

echo PID1=$pid1

while [ ! -e "$catchupdir/tmp3.ts" ]

        do

        sleep 1

        done

echo Starting mplayer

rm tvfifo.ts

mkfifo tvfifo.ts

play > tvfifo.ts &

mplayer -quiet -hardframedrop -ao pulse -cache 128 tvfifo.ts

exit

and this desktop file as /home/user/.local/share/applications/hildon/tvcatchup.desktop:

Code:

[Desktop Entry]

Encoding=UTF-8

Name=TV Catchup

GenericName=TV Catchup

Exec=osso-xterm "/bin/sh /home/user/tvcatchup.sh"

Terminal=true

Type=Application

Re: TVCatchup script

this sounds great but sorry for being a nob but how do you save a script:o

Re: TVCatchup script

sorry to bump but this is an exciting development

Re: TVCatchup script

Quote:

Originally Posted by bjknight (Post 683204)

ddwwf1, if you work through the above post, you should find that it works fine.

Give it a go.

just not sure how to save a script in the locations specified

Re: TVCatchup script

Tried the script - modified it to use Opera Mobile as the browser to download the playlist.. get the following:

Code:

~ $ sh tvcatchup.sh

Starting Opera

method return sender=:1.32 -> dest=:1.220 reply_serial=2

   uint32 10

mkdir: cannot create directory '/tmp/catchup': File exists

Buffering

rm: cannot remove 'tmp*.ts': No such file or directory

PID1=3377

Base URL: http://84.234.23.231:1935/iphone/iphone_bbcone.sdp

tvcatchup.sh: line 61: wget: not found

tail: can't open '/tmp/test': No such file or directory

tail: no files

Error on Line 61 repeats until I stop the script wth CTRL+Z

Re: TVCatchup script

Quote:

Originally Posted by ddwwf1 (Post 683316)

just not sure how to save a script in the locations specified

If you saved/created the file in MyDocs, use this to move it:

mv /home/user/MyDocs/tvcatchup.sh /home/user/tvcatchup.sh