What is MythStream?

"MythStream is an unofficial Internet radio / video plugin for mythTV" - From MythStream home page

If you like to listen to streamed music or watch news and videos from other areas (countries especially) then mythstream is for you. It is especially nice to view news from foreign countries during dramatic world events. If you use MythStream, please consider contributing deletions and additions to the default list of streams to the KnoppMyth maintainers. Currently, there are some obsolete streams defined, which will confuse first-time users.

Finding Good Streams

There are many places to find streams. One of the better sites is www.vtuner.com

• On another computer, install the latest version of ethereal.
  (It now captures RTSP/RealMedia? information!)
  
• If you click on a windows type stream (mms:) you should be able to see the url in the mplayer-plugin window. If not then follow the same steps for RealMedia?.
  
• Start ethereal (may have to start it as root).
  
• Make sure to check "Enable Network Name Resolution" and begin capture.
  
• Find a link on vtuner.com and click on it. Wait for the video to start playing. Stop the video and then stop ethereal.
  
• View ethereal's log, looking for (in Realmedia's case) the RTSP protocol entries.
  
  • In the second section of ethereal toward the bottom (you may have to scroll down) you will see RealMedia?, click on the triangle to expand that information.
    
  • Normally the URL does not show up until the 4th thru about 7th RTSP entry. Most sites use a default setup, port 554. and default directory of encoder.
  • Look for something similar to this: rtsp://192.168.0.2:554/encoder/path/to/file.rm.
    
  • Ethereal will also display the exact ip of the server, this isn't the best to use since some IP#'s change. Look in a few previous RTSP entries for the DNS name.
    
  • If it is a windows format, look for "mms://" at the beginning. It may not have a direct filename, so you may have to test a few entries.
    
• Final step is to test the URL by opening a terminal and manually entering the URL similar to
  
  • mplayer -cache 1000 rtsp://192.168.0.2:554/encoder/path/to/file.rm
    
• Hopefully it will begin playing the stream, if not try a few different URL paths that might be shown in the RTSP entries.
  

This pages contains some streams: StreamList

Finding good streams 2

Use streamsniff from the mythstream webpage http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~moongies/streamtuned.html

More on Finding Good Streams (from Kerry Morrison on the myth-users mailing list)

There are 2 websites I found which contain lots of international tv and radio streams.

• The first one http://www.vtuner.com has literally 1000's of streams. Use this link for basic instructions http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:Mp65gFdh6MAJ:mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php%3Fp%3D20239%26+mythstream&hl=en&start=8&lr=lang_en The original post on mysettopbox.tv seems to be missing.

• The 2nd big site is wwitv.com. It has TV sites from around the world. The trick here is-click on a link>a small popup window will open, it is an .asx file with redirect info in it. Write the name in the title bar down. Run wget http://wwitv.com/_tv/.asx That will download the file to your Mythbox. Run vi .asx and the 'real' stream info is there. add it to streams.res in /home/mythtv/.mythtv/mythstream and you're done. This thing is GREAT! I've been listening to Rockland Radio for 3 days straight.

Getting Harvesting and Podcast functions to work under Mythstream

With a few releases of Knoppmyth, the podcasting and stream harvesting functions of Mythstream fail to work. To get these functions to work, an additonal perl module is required. The documentation on the mythstream site doesn't seem to mention this dependency.

1. cpan
2. cpan>force install XML::DOM

Adding streams

You really need a keyboard and mouse connected to do this (though you may be able to manage with just a keyboard)...

1. Go to the "STREAM settings" menu in the setup section of the front end (probably Utilities/Setup->Setup->Media Settings->STREAM Settings)
2. Choose Streams
3. Select the "Radio" heading (or whichever is appropriate) in the Stations box on the left
4. Type in the relevant info on the right (described below)
5. Click on Add
6. hit Esc and go and try to play the stream...

The Info for each stream is:

• Stream Folder: Which group the station shows up in (e.g. Radio, TV, podcasts, etc.)
• Stream Name: This is what shows up in the list of streams
• Stream Url: The url for the stream or the url of the page the stream is on
• Stream Description: just fyi, no real function
• Stream Handler: The PERL script that scrapes the streams from the Stream Url page. They are located in /myth/stream/parsers/. You can leave this blank (I think it uses the default parser)).

Installing MythStream

NOTE: MythStream is installed on more recent (R5D1? and later) versions of Knoppmyth.

R5B7

There is now an install script for version R5B7. I tried it out and it worked well for me and made the install of MythStream a breeze! Thanks to the author of the script Bob Igo for this! This is what I did to install MythStream with the cool new script.

• Exit out of the mythtv frontend
• Open a terminal window or login via ssh.
  • su (change to root)
  • cd /usr/local/bin

    {Added 5/13/2006 - the old codecs are no longer on mplayerhq.hu & files on mplayerhq.hu have changed }

  • nano mythstream-install.sh
    • Change the line: export MPLAYER_CODECS_VERSION=20050412

      to

      export MPLAYER_CODECS_VERSION=20060501

    • Change the line: ftp://ftp5.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/releases/MPlayer-$MPLAYER_VERSION.tar.bz2</pre>;

      to

      http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/MPlayer-$MPLAYER_VERSION.tar.bz2

    • Edit by kwbolte:
      

      Because of MPlayer server problems I had to use this mirror

      ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/X11/multimedia/MPlayer/releases/MPlayer-$MPLAYER_VERSION.tar.bz2

      Also I had to change

      http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/all-$MPLAYER_CODECS_VERSION.tar.bz2

      to

      ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/X11/multimedia/MPlayer/releases/codecs/all-$MPLAYER_CODECS_VERSION.tar.bz2

    • Hit CTRL-O and hit enter to save, CTRL-X to exit
  • then type:

    mythstream-install.sh

It will take a little while to install, but once it's done you can restart the frontend and you can find it (I'm using the G.A.N.T style) under Media Library, Internet Stream.

Please edit this if you have better instructions.

--digitalfator

Edit By Daffydk
It turns out if you do it with the mythstream-install.sh script then you CAN'T use Ross Campbell's ( i think thats his name ) script. If you do it the "old" way like below it works fine.

I used the mythstream-install.sh script included in the /usr/local/bin directory. The script successfully installed the Mythstream plugin, mplayer codecs and uninstalled the an earlier mplayer release, but the script stopped because it failed to download and install a newer mplayer release (MPlayer-1.0pre7try2.tar.bz2).

• As root (su), I downloaded this file from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/ to /home/mythtv
• extracted the contents of the archive
  • tar -xjvf MPlayer-1.0pre7try2.tar.bz2
• changed to the new directory
  • cd /home/mythtv/MPlayer-1.0pre7try2.tar.bz2
• configured the applicaton
  • ./configure --prefix=/usr --confdir=/etc/mplayer
• then installed
  • make mplayer
  • make install
  • cp mplayer /usr/local/bin)

Note you can also probably avoid this problem by editing the script to wget the mplayer source from the http://www instead of ftp://ftp5? and adding capitals to MPlayer in the path (.hu/MPlayer/ instead of .hu/mplayer/)

--Dr. Hood (edited nickread & doc)

pre-R5B7

1. Log in as root
   
2. Download mythstream and player.xml from http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~moongies/streamtuned.html
   

   (Make sure to get mythstream at bottom of page, not streamtuned at top)
   

3. tar -xvzf mythstream-v0.16_5.tar.gz
   
4. export QTDIR=/usr/share/qt3
   
5. export PATH=$PATH:$QTDIR/bin
   

1. --------------------------------------

   Edit By Daffydk
   

   There is no need too do the following anymore in R5B7
   

2. cd /usr/src/mythtv/source
   
3. tar -xvjf mythtv-0.17.tar.bz2
   
4. cd mythtv-0.17
   
5. edit settings.pro and change /usr/local to /usr.
   
6. cd path-to-mythstream/mythstream
   
7. ln -s /usr/src/mythtv/source/mythtv-0.17/libs/libmyth mythtv
   
8. nano mythstream.pro
   • remove " ../libs/reposstorage.h"
     this is no longer needed and returns errors during make if not removed)
     
   Edit End Daffydk
   --------------------------------

9. qmake mythstream.pro
   
10. make
    
11. make install
    
12. cd /usr/share/mythtv
    
13. in library.xml, add

    <button>
    

    <type>STREAM</type>
    

    <text>Internet Stream</text>
    

    <action>PLUGIN mythstream</action>
    

    <depends>mythstream</depends>
    

    </button>

14. in media_settings.xml:

    <button>
    

    <button>
    

    <type>SETTINGS_STREAM</type>
    

    <text>Stream Settings</text>
    

    <action>CONFIGPLUGIN mythstream</action>
    

    <depends>mythstream</depends>
    

    </button>

15. in themes/blue/theme.xml (not required for G.A.N.T. or Titvillus):

    <buttondef name="STREAM">
    

    <image>stream.png</image>
    

    <offset>50,40</offset>
    

    </buttondef>

16. download rp9codecs-20040626 from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/codecs.html#realvideo
    
17. create directory /usr/local/lib/codecs and untarred the above file into it.
    
18. apt-get install mplayer-k7
    
19. mv /usr/local/bin/mplayer /usr/local/bin/mplayer-old
    

Note

You may need to install mplayer from source to get it to play realmedia files. Before you do that though you need to download and install the codecs from mplayer's site. Get these (some of them may have duplicates, but I like to get them to be sure)

• essential-20040922.tar.bz2
  
• all-20040916.tar.bz2
  
• rp9codecs-20040626.tar.bz2
  

Untar all of them and copy the files into /usr/local/lib/codecs

Untar mplayer, change to new directory now type:

./configure --with-reallibdir=/usr/local/lib/codecs

make

make install
-- Al Heinen

Apple Trailer Support:

(Included in later versions)

1. Add a new stream entry with a name of "whatever" and a handler of "*apple". 2. To watch the trailers, make sure to rebuild Mplayer according to the above directions. In additonal, another perl module is required.

MythStream Mythweb interface

(Included in later versions)

1. cd mythstreamweb
   
2. sh install.sh
   
3. The script will ask for the mythweb location.

   The command

   "locate program_detail.php" will return the correct directory.

   My mythweb was installed at

   /usr/share/mythtv/mythweb/.

4. prosonik (13-Sept-05)

Further tips

• There is a good discussion on http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=28749&