[Request] Tips for watching sports streams

[encrypted 13]

I find myself in a situation where streaming is the only way to watch sports events such as Champions League football and my link is often as slow as 2-3mbps.

 

I've come across a link aggregation site (http://footballstreaming.info/streams/todays-links/index.html) which usually lists at least some dodgy ad-ridden flash or p2p acestream links.

 

Anyone have any experience with the acestream software? It's supposed to offer much more reasonable image quality than the average flash stream, but it appears to be of russian origin and some hackers over there might have hostile intentions.

 

Most flash streams on the other hand seem to be eternally choppy despite their very low bandwidth and resolution. It doesn't seem to make much, if any difference whether I'm connecting to the Air servers nearest my location or other regions. Could simple low-bandwidth flash streams be throttled by my local provider?

 

I have a "blank" NSFW laptop with the usual array of noscript, ublock etc available for this pastime, so throw caution in the wind and install acestream? Relax the script and ad-blocking regime and surf barenaked? Try different protocols and ports?

 

 

Anyone get a decent experience with these streams and if so, how? Any settings, servers or streaming sites that you might recommend?

 

 

[go558a83nk 362]

I would install Kodi and some addons such as phoenix, genesis, and more. 

[zhang888 1066]

If you are an active content consumer, I would recommend subscribing to a premium provider such as Netflix, Hulu etc, whatever fits your needs more.

For a small monthly fee you will benefit from a large amount of content, with well maintained CDN networks that can ensure high quality streaming that

in most cases would only be limited by your network connection speed.

 

You can get some content free, but this will usually involve installing special "hacks" or closed source junk like all those Popcorn clones, and the quality

will mostly depend how popular that particular content is.

Some of the money you pay for premium also goes to the content distributers, and this is important since you won't have any ads in the middle.

 

 

Offtopic:

I think this is the real answer against piracy, not DMCA laws. During many years I never found myself paying for content, just because I never found

the need or the prices were too high. But with this, it's like a flat-rate internet plan to stream all you can, with some perks like no junk or almost zero

risk of getting spyware from installing a yet another streaming app with it's own plugins.

[encrypted 13]

Right now I'm interested in a working kludge, but the ideal solution would of course be a safe, reasonably priced and well-executed subscription service that would allow users to legally get around the artificial geographical barriers. BBC's streaming service is technologically exemplary at delivering streams reliably at the best possible quality depending on the user's specific bandwidth and when new codecs like HEVC are introduced they can only get better.

 

I've heard good things about Netflix, Hulu etc., but they might not fare so well under slower 1-2mbps bandwidth situations.

 

It's ironic that due to restrictive copyright deals fuelled by greed the clubs aren't allowed to provide profitable service to those outside the availability of current offerings. UEFA and national associations should just pull their heads out and license the streaming right to any legitimate party for a per/head fee.

 

For now it seems that the generally dodgy and usually lousy flash streams are it. It's hit and miss to find a decent stream and then an Air server that meshes well with it.

[baneofthesith 8]

I have been using acestream for almost a year and I must say the quality is much much better than any flash stream that I previously used. Plus, it seems more stable that the flash streams or sopcast because of the p2p technology.

 

Whether it works on slow internet I can't really say. My internet connection is quite slow (not because of the budget, but because the country in which I live has "awesome" ICT technology), but I am seldomly unable to watch something on acestream. WIth regards to ads, they are not annoying, I get once in a while an ad, when I start the stream, but I can skip after 3 or 4 seconds.I tried a lot of things to watch sport events, but acestream provides by far the best image quality and stability.

 

When it comes to paid alternatives, there is no netflix or hulu for live sports events, while tv does not broadcast all the matches/competitions that I am interested in. So acestream provides high quality streams that broadcast all Champions League, La Liga, Premier League, Italian Seria A, MotoGP or Formula 1, Rugby's Six Nations Tournament or Four Nations Cup and so on.

 

Tell me if there is any paid alternative that streams/broadcasts all these competions? I would gladly pay a reasonable amount of money to get access to something like this, but there is no such thing.

 

Plus Netflix is a joke in my country. Their library has tv series that were aired last year, while the current season will be available next year, of course. With this business model I will probably watch a football game 2 months after it was played. An innovative company has to come up with some ideas to acquire the rights to live stream because right now you either use acestream or watch some live coverage on tv (bbc broadcasts some Formula 1 races, Eurosports broadcasts MotoGP in some countries and so on).

 

I will stay with acestream for the time being. It's an amazing streaming technology and if you are a sports passionate you kind of have streams from all mainstream sports. In my opinion, there are alternatives for watching tv series and movies (like Hulu and Netflix, with their limits of course, but they exist), for music you have Spotify, but for sport events there is nothing that I know.

[encrypted 13]

I caved and installed the beloved hairball that is Kodi along with a couple of streaming add-ons with most recent setup guides I could find and already those add-ons seem to be discontinued. It's a veritable jungle and either things go without a hitch or one can spend hours or weeks scavenging for solutions. Running Linux probably doesn't make things any easier.

 

I wanted to give acestream a go in particular, but any stream I tried would give up after some seconds and maybe the reason is that the Linux version used by the add-on is outdated, but to figure that out would entail delving into a hairball (acestream) inside a hairball (Kodi) and then there's no knowing if and how the version could be manually upgraded.     Then there's the little Kodi issues like no cut and paste in their GUI so devilishly long URLs and hashes must be manually entered, none of the streams list their bandwidth requirements or any up/down info if the stream picks up etc. But I can appreciate what the Kodi developers are trying to achieve.

 

If someone finds an up to date guide for an acestream setup working under Linux I'll be happy to check it out.

[baneofthesith 8]

   Then there's the little Kodi issues like no cut and paste in their GUI so devilishly long URLs and hashes must be manually entered, none of the streams list their bandwidth requirements or any up/down info if the stream picks up etc. But I can appreciate what the Kodi developers are trying to achieve.

 

If someone finds an up to date guide for an acestream setup working under Linux I'll be happy to check it out.

http://acestreamguide.com/linux/

[encrypted 13]

Thanks. Seems that guide is also out of date for those using the project's own PPA repo.

 

This one mentions packages up to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

 

http://forum.torrentstream.org/index.php?topic=2969.0

 

Note: Enabling the repo means trusting the packages that project wants to push onto your system..

 

 

I think this would be the project's original russian page for the "engine" parts.

 

http://wiki.acestream.org/wiki/index.php/AceStream_3.0/en

 

 

On the Kodi pages I saw a reference to using the latest available "engine" with a video add-on, but found no details on how to do it.

 

 

That said, Kodi is impressive for what it's meant to be: fancy point-click media center with pretty sane default functionality and insane jungle of unofficial add-ons just around the corner that more or less works on just about any platform, some better than others. There are add-ons to give you loads of flash (huh) and P2P streams, but their sources and bandwidth requirements tend to remain unknown.

 

Even for a Linux user Kodi can be a simple way of actually finding and playing flash and sopcast sports streams, even if there's usually some trial and error involved with the provided links.

 

Using a VPN is of course strongly recommended and especially so with the P2P streams. Some server locations work better with P2P than others.

[baneofthesith 8]

Even for a Linux user Kodi can be a simple way of actually finding and playing flash and sopcast sports streams, even if there's usually some trial and error involved with the provided links.

 

Using a VPN is of course strongly recommended and especially so with the P2P streams. Some server locations work better with P2P than others.

 

I always use rojadirecta.me or livesport.sx to get the acestream links. I select one of the many options from the lists. Since I find rojadirecta's interface a bit more clean and friendly, I usually end up on one of ArenaVision's channels. These two websites provide channels that work smoothlesly in 98% the cases (sometimes one of the streams has no active peers, but I can easily click on another one). Since I don't use any Linux distro as my OS, I do not know what happens when you click on arenavision and ask to open the stream directly in acestream. Now, my solution would be check on the two aforementioned websites the sport event that you are looking for and get the acestream link from http://www.livefootballol.com/acestream-channel-list.html. Then you just paste the link that you need directly in acestream.

[LazyLizard14 11]

Correct me if I am wrong but afaik for Kodi the P2P plugins P2PSports and Plexus have been discontinued by the developer. Is there any solution for Kodi that works?

[encrypted 13]

All work and no play makes awfully dull girls and boys.

 

Kodi plugins seems to come and go and when they're not autoupdated it's necessary to check out a site like http://www.koditips.com for news on updates, abandonments or new plugins.

 

Phoenix plugin is still being updated, but some say it recently lost some of its sports links.

 

SportsDevil seems to get frequent updates (requires simple manual uninstall and reinstall each time) and may be helpful for some.

 

I have absolutely no idea how safe and secure these packages are so I wouldn't install them in a system where I keep my master plans for world domination.     

 

I installed the above-mentioned P2P plugins when this project started without knowing that they had already been recently abandoned. As a result sopcast was installed and works, although offerings are very limited. Acestream was supposed to be installed but never was. SportsDevil does often show plenty of flash streams, but on my system or version of Kodi flash wants to own the CPU rendering that option unwelcome. Others with different versions of packages and hardware may have better experiences.

[atcusb 1]

Kodi and acestream do play well on linux, but it's not always straight forward. I've found that rather than relying on plexus/p2p streams downloading the client, it's better to download the latest engine, and tell plexus/p2p streams to use the external engine. You can then use addons such as sportsdevil or castaway (arenavision is excellent BTW) to navigate acestream without having to manually enter the long acestream ID's

 

 

fwiw, this works on debian based distro's saved as a bash script, with the execution bit set and run with sudo (chmod +x nameofscript then sudo ./nameofscript for those not so linux literate)

 

#!/bin/bash

cd /tmp

wget http://dl.acestream.org/ubuntu/14/acestream_3.0.5.1_ubuntu_14.04_x86_64.tar.gz && tar -xvzf acestream_3.0.5.1_ubuntu_14.04_x86_64.tar.gz

cd acestream_3.0.5.1_ubuntu_14.04_x86_64

cp -r * /usr/bin 

chmod +x /usr/bin/acestreamengine

apt-get install python-m2crypto python-apsw python-setuptools

echo "CLI Value should read: /usr/bin/acestreamengine --lib-path /usr/bin --client-console --live-cache-type memory --live-cache-size 2097152000 --max-peers 200"

 

Note the last line, this would have to be entered into the Plexus\p2p streams configuration, and type set to "use my own". Also, these are for a reasonably well connected system with about a gb of ram free, adjust --live-cache-size (bytes) appropriately and reduce --max-peers to accommodate bandwidth.

 

It's also best to port forward TCP8621, which I'm struggling with via AirVPN as someone else has reserved it... all suggestions welcome....