Originally Posted by arajantie

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
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

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.