Livestreamer

Livestreamer is a CLI program that launches live streams from various streaming services in a custom video player.

Currently supported sites are:

GOMTV.net
Justin.tv/Twitch.tv
Ongamenet
Own3d.tv
SVTPlay
UStream
YouTube

Dependencies

Livestreamer and it's plugins currently depends on these software:

Python version >= 2.6 and >= 3.0 (currently CPython and PyPy is known to work)
python-setuptools or python-distribute
python-requests (at least version 0.12.1)
python-pbs
python-argparse (only needed for Python version < 2.7)

For RTMP based plugins:

librtmp/rtmpdump (git clone after 2011-07-31 is needed for Twitch/JustinTV plugin)

Installing (Linux, OS X etc)

Make sure you have at least Python and python-setuptools then run:

$ sudo python setup.py install

This should install any missing Python dependencies automatically if they are missing.

Installing (Windows)

Install Python
Install Python setuptools
Get rtmpdump and unpack it somewhere (rtmpdump-20110925-git-6230845-win32.zip from the downloads section should work)
Add these paths to your Path environment variable:

[Python path]\
[Python path]\scripts\
[rtmpdump path]\ (or specify full path with --rtmpdump option)
[VLC/mplayer/other path]\ (or specify full path with --player option)

Open a command prompt and change directory to livestreamer source, then run:

python setup.py install

This should install any missing Python dependencies automatically if they are missing.

Using

$ livestreamer --help

Common issues

livestreamer errors with "Unable to read from stream" or "Error while executing subprocess" on Twitch/JustinTV streams. When building rtmpdump from source it may link with a already existing (probably older) librtmp version instead of using it's own version. On Debian/Ubuntu it is recommended to use the official packages of librtmp0 and rtmpdump version 2.4+20111222.git4e06e21 or newer. This version contains the necessary code to play Twitch/JustinTV streams and avoids any conflicts. It should be available in the testing or unstable repositories if it's not available in stable yet.

VLC on Windows failes to play with a error message. VLC version 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 contains a bug that prevents it from reading data from stdin. This has been fixed in version 2.0.3.

Saving arguments AKA config file

Livestreamer can read arguments from the file ~/.livestreamerrc (POSIX) or %APPDATA%\livestreamer\livestreamerrc (Windows). A example file:

player=mplayer
gomtv-username=username
gomtv-password=password

Using livestreamer as a library

http://livestreamer.readthedocs.org/

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