Fresh From a Stream

At tonight's San Fernando Valley LUG meeting, our friend Larry was at it again, trying to access media streams from http://www.freetv.com from the text console, preferably from the Lynx browser. After a lot of floundering around, we managed to play a few of the URLs given in descriptive text (not expressed in HTML links) with mplayer.

After arriving home, here are some things I found to explore the site with.

Install Privoxy, and add the following to your /etc/privoxy/user.action file(or perhaps the /etc/privoxy/standard.action if the release of Privoxy you are using doesn't have the user.action file):

{ +filter{freetv} }
.freetv.com

Then add the following to /etc/privoxy/user.filter (or /etc/privoxy/standard.filter if your Privoxy doesn't use a user.filter):

#################################################################################
#
# freetv: Try to convert certain URLs floating in space to actual links
#               05/31/2008 d.e.l.
#
#################################################################################
FILTER: freetv Try to convert certain URLs to automaticly launch jlinks

s| (mmst?://[^ <>]*) |<A href="$1">$1</A>|igsx

Restart privoxy, typically with

sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy restart

Then, install this script, I called it mmStreamer somewhere in a directory in your PATH variable:

#!/bin/bash


URL="${1}"    ;


TURL=${URL#*://}      ;
TURL=${TURL%%[/?]*}   ;
echo 'Domain: '  ${TURL}          ;

ping  -qc 3  ${TURL}    ;
DOMAIN_TEST_RESULT=$?  ;

if [ ! ${DOMAIN_TEST_RESULT} ]
then
  echo "The domain ${TURL} seems bogus.  Hit return to continue."  ;
  read  BOGUS  ;
  exit  ;
fi

sudo mplayer -vf-clr "${URL}"    ;



sudo mplayer -vf-clr -playlist "${URL}"   ;

exit  ;

You may need to modify the lines with mplayer to match how you normally invoke mplayer, just make sure one has the -playlist parameter so one or the other may run. And of course, make sure to adjust permissions with chmod ugo+x mmStreamer. There are probably many improvements that can be made to this script, but it is partly a proof of concept script, partly something to get rolling with some quick results.

Then to your lynx.cfg file, add to the EXTERNALs section add:

EXTERNAL:mms:mmsStreamer %s:TRUE:TRUE

The last 'TRUE' will cause mmsStreamer to be run automaticly when you activeate a link with type mms.

Now, the next time you go to http://www.freetv.com, you should be able to play some of the mms stream URLs, that will now be actual links. Some of them seemed to be mere ads, others seemed to have bonafide content. A few might be missed, I noticed one with the typo of two colons (mms:://) and a Google search of the site turned up couple of http streams. These seem to be the exceptions that will have to still be handled by hand. A lot seemed no longer there, but perhaps a better choice of mplayer switches and settings might tap into them.

A few things turned up browsing the site.
• One is that I was reminded of the http://www.la36.org site, with a lot of Los Angeles local content. I didn't have the time to investigate if it is being updated, but I did notice a few videos of past L.A. Public Library / Library Foundation ALoud talks. A few of these are of technical interest, such Craig "List" Newmark, and one on the Google Book project.
• I probably should ad some capability to deal with http://www.la36.org to usnatch
• I was spurred to search Wikipedia for http://www.freetv.com and it turned up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_access_stations_%28United_States%29. Perhaps some creative search will turn up a few other pages to explore.
• http://www.drgenescott.com didn't seem to be active, but it did remind me of the many times I'd passed him the TV dial in days past, and the many discussions of this archtypal L.A. CA personality.