P2P TV on Ubuntu

I love sports; football (or should I say soccer?), basketball, ice hockey, cricket, winter olympics, even darts. I love watching them, too. So, the question is: "How can I watch them?"

Of course the answer is: "P2P TV". Unfortunately, for this case only, I don't care if it's legal or not. Because as soon as someone can broadcast a match, I will watch that. There is a magical website for this:

MyP2P.eu


Sopcast

We know all about sopcast. We've got gtk sopcast and qsopcast. You select a channel from the list or you copy and paste the channel links. These are all native clients so it's not a problem.

TVUPlayer

I've got this working properly except that fonts don't show. There is a simple workaround for this.

• You will have to open the stream with VLC or MPlayer or whatever your favourite player is. The network address is: http://127.0.0.1:8901/



• Next, since you can't see channel names, you will have to look up for the order on the software's channels page and that would be: http://pages.tvunetworks.com/channels/
  

Here's a little screenshot of my proof:




PPLive

This one needs a workaround for Windows, too. I guess their servers are banned or something so you've got to use proxy. The one I found that is up and working well is:

212.22.158.132:8080

Then the network address you're looking for is:

http://127.0.0.1:8888/

Here's my screenshot:




Tvkoo

Network address for this one is:

http://127.0.0.1:9800/

and here's my screenshot:




TVAnts

Network address for this one is tricky. The filenames changes as you change the channels. For example, if you're trying to open the first channel you loaded it's 1.asf, if it's the second it's 2.asf, so on so forth. For the first one the address is:

http://localhost:16900/1.asf

Here's my screenshot:




Linking w/ Epiphany or Firefox

After you handle all of these programs, you can associate tvu://, sop:// or other links with the matching software. Type about:config in your browser, right-click and select New > string. Then:

For sopcast:
name: network.protocol-handler.app.sop
value: qsopcast (or gsopcast)

For TVUPlayer:
name: network.protocol-handler.app.tvu
value: /home/your-user-name/Program Files/TVUPlayer/TVUPlayer.exe

For PPLive:
name: network.protocol-handler.app.pplive
value: /home/your-user-name/Program Files/PPLive/PPLive.exe

For Tvkoo:
name: network.protocol-handler.app.tvkoo
value /path/you/saved/the/file/viviplay.exe

For TVAnts:
name: network.protocol-handler.app.tvants
value: /home/your-user-name/Program Files/TVAnts/TVAnts.exe


Have fun!

Taking my chances on IBM Lotus Symphony

It's bad news for OpenOffice.org fanatics out there. This time there is an actual rival: IBM Lotus Symphony.

Let's start with the installation for Ubuntu:

1. Get the .bin file from here.
2. Right-click and make the file executable.
3. Turn off any desktop effects. The installer is allergic to them.
4. Double-click and select "run in terminal".
5. After the setup finishes, type "gksudo nautilus" in a terminal.
6. Browse into your home folder, hit ctrl+h, right-click .lotus folder and change the permissions for your user.
7. You're good to go.

Open the program through Applications > Office > IBM Lotus Symphony.

- The first thing i noticed is the tabbed structure. You can open different document, spreadsheet and presentation files in just one window. I saw something about importing different clients (like a mail client) but i haven't got to be able to do that, yet. Still it feels very compact.

- Another difference is you have a panel on the right. It's a properties panel and works like the one in Visual Studio. Seems more useful than having everything on two linear panels.

- Not to get lost in a sea of documents there is a thumbnail button, you can browse the documents on a compiz's scale-like pane.

- The software mainly supports .odf format but you can also import and export Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org and Smart Suite documents.

- At least but not least, they've got a support forum.

I must say, it seems very promising. The layout is a little different than the usual, though. But it's easy to get used to. The tabbing is just useful when you get the hang of it. The only negative side i can think of it is that it is a ram-monster. As it is just a Beta 2, I'm hoping that they will fix that with the final release.

The best thing about Lotus Symphony is that IBM promises that this software will ALWAYS be free. Go free software!