Even though I'm not a TV guy, I sometimes feel the need to watch TV. I don't actually have a TV of my own, so I'm forced to use different kinds of streaming frameworks. One of these frameworks is SopCast, and although they provide Linux binaries, the GUI isn't the most well-designed. They do have a terminal version that makes a stream accessible on a local port, which can be viewed in basically any player.

To make this terminal version a little more friendly, I wrote a little script that starts up sp-sc-auth, leaves it a little while to buffer, then runs vlc, directly opening the stream. When you've closed vlc, sp-sc-auth is automagically killed too.

Here it is:

#!/bin/sh
sp-sc-auth sop://broker.sopcast.com:3912/6001 6555 7010 > /dev/null &
sleep 5
vlc http://localhost:7010/tv.asf > /dev/null &
kill_sp_sc=`jobs -l | grep sp-sc-auth | awk '{print $2}'`
wait_for_vlc=`jobs -l | grep vlc | awk '{print $2}'`
wait $wait_for_vlc
kill $kill_sp_sc

Of course, you'll need to install sp-sc-auth yourself, and you'll also need to use the sopcast broker address for the channel of your choice. I keep a directory full of this kind of scripts, one for each channel I want to see. Enjoy!