Watch P2P Television on Linux with Sopcast and VLC player

On Windows I was used to watching on-line television with the software Sopcast. On linux I had to spend about an hour to setup everything to correctly view P2P Tv, so I believe that this post may be useful to other people.

First of all, find and download the file sopcast-3.0.1-1.pkg.tar.gz or a more recent version if available. Then unzip it on your disk and change directory going into its bin folder

tar xfvz sopcast-3.0.1-1.pkg.tar.gz
cd sopcast-3.0.1-1.pkg/usr/bin/

It’s now time to run the service that will connect to a p2p television stream, and will stream that video on your PC.

./sp-sc-auth sop://your.favouritetv.com:3912/6002 3908 8908 > /dev/null

Obviously replace the URL sop://your.favouritetv.com:3912/6002 with the URL of the television you want to watch (on MyP2P.eu there are some good channel listings) Be careful to pick an URL for Sopcast (there are many other kind of p2p softwares such as TvAnts and so on that uses different protocols).

Now there is a background service on your system that streams that TV on the chosen port 8908

The final step is to run VLC Media Player to view that stream on your monitor. This is the command:

vlc http://localhost:8908/tv.asf

Enjoy the show 🙂