scrambled channel

For the past few days I’ve been playing around the Linux version of the Sopcast player. In the words of it’s creators:

SoP is abbreviation for Streaming over P2P. Sopcast is the Streaming Direct Broadcast System based on P2P. The core is the communication protocol produced by Sopcast Team, which is named Sop://, or sop technology. Our goal is to let everyone in the world have a chance to set up their own on-line media world!

Essentially it’s a p2p protocol for media streams which works in a similair way to BitTorrent. There are numerous other protocols including the open source PeercastHowever I’ve not really found anything too interesting using Peercast. On the other hand, people using Sopcast tend to create channels showing what I’m interested in seeing…

You see, despite the stated, utopian goals of the sopcast project, the channels I’ve seen are usually rebroadcasting television from all around the world. In other words, it’s great for watching free live football. It’s not just football though, in the past few days, as well as watching Bolton beat Liverpool, I’ve caught a couple of the Major League Baseball playoffs and some weird cheerleading competition (yeah, just like the one in Bring it On)

The linux client has been around for a while now but it isn’t as full featured as the Windows version. You can download it here. I’ve only used the command line tool but someone has provided a qt front end. The basic client contains a binary named “sc-sp”. To start using it, choose a channel from this this list and then run the application using something like this:

sp-sc sop://211.152.34.35:3912/6003 3908 8908

This creates an asf stream from the sopcast channel at sop://211.152.34.35:3912/6003 on your local machine at port 8908 with the name video.asf. You can then play with your media player of choice. Using mplayer I type:

gmplayer http://localhost:8908/video.asf

Note: It’s downer, but the stream created is in a proprietary format. To play it you will need to install the w32codecs if you haven’t already in order to play the stream.

So how good is it? The quality depends on the settings for the channel but as the screenshot above shows, it’s good enough to watch a game of football. I’m not thrilled to be using a closed source app and it also segfaults sometimes right after starting which is annoying. However, once it’s up and running it seems to be pretty stable. Remember, it will eat quite a bit of bandwidth so use it sparingly if you’re usage is capped or your sharing a connection.

The last thing to note is that I have no idea how legal this is where you live. I don’t even know how legal it is where I live. I suspect we’ll slip through the cracks though…