Hello,

FIFA World Cup 2010 is coming:

Since the time in South Africa is the same as the time in Finland, I realized that there will probably be some games played while I'm still at work. I did not want to miss those games so I decided to set up my ubuntu 10.04 desktop to stream the dvb-t channels so that I can watch the games whenever I like (at work).

There are of course internet services providing streams of the games, but where is the fun in using those?

Here is how I got the n900 and my ubuntu 10.04 desktop to play together:

I have a Cinergy T2 usb dvb-t receiver connected to my desktop and I use cvlc (command line vlc) to transcode a dvb-t channel on the fly to my local network. An Openssh server running on the desktop is also required.

SSH is used to provide a safe way to connect to the desktop from a remote location.

mplayer on n900 is used to view the stream.

1. Open a ssh connection from your n900 to your desktop

ssh -p 22 -L 1234:localhost:1234 username@yourip

2. Start the streaming from dvb-t stick:

Below you have two command line examples to get the streaming started. The examples are for two finnish dvb-t channels that are showing the games.

Run the command(s) on ssh command prompt (or create bash scripts and run those):

Finnish channel YLE TV1:
or

Finnish channel YLE TV2:
3. Watch the stream on n900 with mplayer:

open a new terminal on n900 and run mplayer:

mplayer http://localhost:1234

Note that it takes some time for mplayer to open the stream, so wait patiently for at least 30-60 seconds.

Things you should know about this experimental set up:
- I have only tested this setup on n900 that is connected to the internet using wlan.
- mplayer on n900 seems to drop the stream quite often, so if you really want to watch the games at work, instead of n900 use a desktop or a laptop that has internet connection and vlc player and ssh-client installed.

<edit>
After a bit more experimenting it is clear that n900 mplayer drops the stream way too often and it is almost unusable for this purpose.

Fortunately there is a vlc player for n900 in development. Vlc installation files can be downloaded from:

http://www.remlab.net/files/vlc/fremantle/

- installation: dpkg -i <filename>

The development version of vlc works very well for watching the stream. To run vlc (instead of mplayer) to watch the stream on n900:

vlc http://localhost:1234

</edit>

Regards,
propelli