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A Bash Script To Watch Live TV Streams

Hi,

In this post I’ll introduce a very simple and basic Bash script, which uses VLC and a plain text file to let you watch Live TV streams of your favorite channels.

First of all, make sure you have VLC installed in your system.

Now to the script:

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#!/bin/bash

#a script to watch TV streams with vlc

list_file=~/.tvlist

channel=$1

channel_url=`grep -w "#$channel" $list_file | cut -f3 -d#`

vlc -f "$channel_url" 2> /dev/null  #run vlc in Full Screen mode and don't display warnings

Save the file (I’ll assume you’ll call it wtv) in /usr/local/bin/ (or anywhere else. saving it in /usr/local/bin/ will allow you to call it from anywhere).

Make the file executable: chmod +x wtv

The script assumes you have the file .tvlist in your home directory, with the following format:

#channel_name  #channel URL  #comments

A line per channel.

Here is an example file:

#bbc  #mms://a1482.v373745.c37374.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1482/37374/498f5ea4/clipdownloads.bbc.co.uk/windowsmedia-acl/news/n5ctrl/summaries/world/bb/video/world_bb.wmv

#jazeera #mms://88.191.45.161/channel13 #arabic

#cnn #mms://a779.l2584224778.c25842.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/779/25842/v0001/reflector:24778

#jazeera_en #mms://skinkers-livestation-client-d0ac-aljazeer-en.wm.llnwd.net/skinkers_livestation_client_d0ac_aljazeer_en

#islam_channel #mms://webcast.islamchannel.tv/IslamVideo

#haroon #mms://ib2.islambox.tv/harunyahyatv #haroon yahia tv

Save this file as .tvlist in your home directory (or wherever you want, but remember to modify the script).

Now you can run the script like this:

wtv cnn

The script is very basic, it assumes that the user gives it legal input. I may modify it in the future, but this is good for my needs for now. Any ideas will be appreciated.

P.S.

I’m thinking of making a large database of such streams and providing a script/program which will fetch the channels from this database. I don’t know if I’ll have time to do and maintain this alone, so please let me know if you’re interested to help. (It can be a Bash,  Python, CSh script, or a C, C++ program).

Enjoy

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Tags: Bash, Command Line Interface, Linux, Multimedia, Shell Scripts