Livestreamer

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

Currently supported sites are:

• Justin.tv/Twitch.tv
• Own3d.tv
• SVTPlay
• UStream
• YouTube

Note: Justin.tv plugin requires rtmpdump with jtv token support (recent git).

Livestreamer is compatible with Python version >= 2.6 and >= 3.0.

Installing (Linux, OS X etc)

Make sure you have Python and Python setuptools then run:

$ sudo python setup.py install

Installing (Windows)

1. Install Python
2. Install Python setuptools
3. Get rtmpdump and unpack it somewhere (rtmpdump-20110925-git-6230845-win32.zip from http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/ should work)
4. 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)

5. Open a command prompt and change directory to livestreamer source, then run: python setup.py install

Note: If you want to use VLC be aware there is currently a bug in version 2.0.1 that prevents stdin reading from working. Use 2.0.0 or a nightly build for now.

Using

$ livestreamer --help

Saving arguments AKA config file

Livestreamer can read arguments from the file ~/.livestreamerrc. A example file:

player=mplayer
jtv-cookie=_jtv3_session_id=arandomhash

Using livestreamer as a library

Livestreamer is also a library. Short example:

import livestreamer

url = "http://twitch.tv/day9tv"
channel = livestreamer.resolve_url(url)
streams = channel.get_streams()

stream = streams["720p"]
fd = stream.open()

while True:
    data = fd.read(1024)
    if len(data) == 0:
        break

    # do something with data

fd.close()