WSCN video streams possible in kubuntu?

[heinkel_111]

It is a bad weather day in texas and i am pondering to watch a webcast (alpine skiing) with the WCSN sports network.
They actually do webcasts, and as usual, their technical FAQ describes the solutions working for windows only, the site is based on windows media player 9 or later. Flip4mac is listed as an alternative for mac users.

I was thinking there might be a way of getting this to work in kubuntu. I have the w64 codecs installed, so in theory, if I could dish up the authentication to their server I guess I should be good to go.

The race is starting in 1 hour, but there is another race on now which serves as a technical test for me.
I did notice that the way they do it is a flash based player pops up and then starts playing the stream, except "then starts playing the stream" doesn't seem to work for me just yet.

I signed up for a month (recurring) subscription and noticed that the sign up/payment schemes did not work properly in konqueror, but installed firefox to get around that problem (there was an either/or radiobutton set that came out as both buttons pushed all the time in konqueror). So now I have the subscription, I can login fine with konqueror and if I can get the stream to work with authentication, I probably should be fine.

Does anyone have good ideas on how to do this?

[heinkel_111]

Re: WSCN video streams possible in kubuntu?

Replying to myself here, but I made some progress:
When the flash based player opens up in konqueror, it tries to show the media in a kmplayer window inside the flashplayer . This does not work.

However, on one of their archived streams I was able to right-click and open up "configure kmplayer". Then I get a standard KDE configuration box with some alternatives, and the url to the stream is listed.

I took the URL and pasted it into Kaffeine, and it actually opened up and played quite well. Remembering that Kaffeine is a Xine-based player, I guess that what needs to be done to make all of this work effortlessly and automagic is to configure konqueror to use Xine as default player instead of KMplayer. How do I do that?

Off-topic rant: Wouldn't it be a good idea to have Xine as default media player in Konqueror anyway, since all the media applications Kaffeine and Amarok are based on Xine? To me, it looks like the KMplayer is just some old KDE legacy stuff which probably should be eliminated from the Kubuntu distribution for consistency.

[heinkel_111]

Re: WSCN video streams possible in kubuntu?

The "get url from player settings" and paste into kaffeine seems to work, as a hack.
I am not able to configure konqueror to do this automatically, even though in theory it must be possible?

Ideas welcome.
However, I am going to take a break now. I am gonna make some team, curl up under a carpet and enjoy the men's world cup race in alpine skiing from Lake Louise, Canada.

[claydoh]

Re: WSCN video streams possible in kubuntu?

I would suggest installing kmplayer-konq-plugins, and the w32codecs (though as kaffeine plays it, you must already have that).

the videos on that site play for me in both konq (using the above mentioned package) and Firefox (using mozilla-mplayer)

[heinkel_111]

Re: WSCN video streams possible in kubuntu?

Hi Claydoh
Why should I install w32codecs on my 64 bit? (I guess you did not see that i have w64codecs installed.

The method I worked out and described seems like it is working, most of the time.
When it does not, it may be because of some authentication failure. The url for the stream itself is insanely long and the form of it indicates that it triggers a script which glues the main stream to a commercials stream to produce the final broadcast. When I watched this yesterday, they had the "tv-breaks" but not the commercials.

I found out that it may be a better strategy for me to cache the streams locally and then watch it when I have the time for it. There is so little world cup coverage in the press here that the risk for spoilers are somwhat limited.
I tried to fetch the stream with the stream downloader mimms, but there is a ! sign in the middle of the url that confuses bash.

Thanks for the tip on the plugins though!

[claydoh]

Re: WSCN video streams possible in kubuntu?

bah, w32, w64, whats in a name

Don't run 64 bit (yet) so I am unsure if there is any difference, especially as they have the win codecs for 64 bit now. I just click and play video on the site no problems, commercials and all.

It could be the flash, as I seem to remember that being an issue for many with your arch.