Notices

Now either type in the tar command from post #14 and the chmod command from post #16 or cut and paste them.should the word filename be changed to something else other than "filename"

It should play pretty smoothly, although not perfectly. It uses about 90% of the CPU, so you should check that you have nothing else running at the same time. Increasing the cache size on the last line of the script may help a bit. (I'm testing it on a slow and unreliable connection, so I am not sure.)

The other problem I noticed was that depending on other programs you may run out of space in the /tmp folder, so it could be better to store the temporary files in /home/user even though it is probably slower. I've made these changes in the attached script. Again, you can install it with
(I don't think you need to set any permissions...)

Finally, I would recommend running this from the icon, and not from the command line, because otherwise it does not exit cleanly and it will leave threads running which will probably affect the performance later.

right ok guys think i have made a bit of a mess here whats the best way to delete it all and start again

It only allow in UK is it ? I tried to signup but they said only from UK

New script worked flawlessly - no frame drops, running on 3G

I have a strange feeling that something in my pr 1.2 update, or rather some app that I have installed is effecting video playback and overall performance issues.

In general my n900 feels quicker, e.g. music in media player transitions quicker and album art displays quicker.

However, using fast ADSL over wifi I seem to get video playback issues, bot constantly but they are there. I know it's not bandwidth so it must be processing.

Just tried this and it works a treat. Cheers arajantie.

Is there any way of viewing MPlayer in fullscreen?

Press F on the keyboard when MPlayer opens. This toggles windowed/fullscreen

Press "f". You can make it go full screen by default by adding "-fs" to the mplayer arguments in the script. The reason I did not do that was that then there is no obvious way to close it (you have to press "q").

You can change this by editing /etc/gnome/defaults.list, it's the line that starts with audio/x-mpegurl in this case.

I tried setting the default to kmplayer but it doesn't seem to be able to handle the stream, and unfortunately in maemo the application you want to use for this needs to be set up to listen for dbus messages so it's not straightforward to set it as your extraction script.

For OS2008 there was an app called dbus-switchboard that acted as an intermediary to allow this kind of thing (see here). With a few gentle hacks I have this working on the N900, and with a slightly modified version of your script clicking a link on tvcatchup opens the stream in mplayer directly (I'm watching Dennis the Menace as we speak!).

For this to be useful (distributable...) we need a proper port of the dbus-switchboard app - does anyone feel inclined? I don't have much free time coming up but if no one else feels like it I might have a go.

Cheers,
Jan