I Wanna Eurovision on my Lucid

You Rock ‘N Roll kids may think Eurovision has been lost and forgotten, but actually it is unstoppable. Maybe it is a habit you are trying to quit, to which I say: what’s another year? You may be making your mind up about how you want to watch it and I would like to help in everyway that I can to get you watching on Ubuntu.
You can visit my number one Eurovision website where you can watch the show live, it requires a special plugin which takes you on a bit of a wild dance across the internet to the Octoshape site where you can download what they call a plugin. The instructions tell you to chmod +x the downloaded file and run it in a terminal, this works fine and you have to accept the EULA (just shut your eyes, say la la la and type “yes”). As far as I can make out the plugin is a peer to peer streamer, a bit like skype or bittorrent, it is downloading stuff from the central site and streaming it out again to other Divas in your vicinity. It then re-serves the stream locally to all kinds of everything, to the flash applet on the website or to mplayer or vlc. To stream to the flash applet, just run ./OctoshapeClient with no parameters and hit play on the applet. To run it in mplayer first make sure you have mplayer installed and run ./OctoshapeClient -url:octoshape:EBU.esc2010.semi2 (the URL will change for the final, that one should get you all the boom bang-a-bang of the second semi-final) and mplayer will pop up (it executed mplayer -nocache http://127.0.0.1:6498/ms2/1274825307308/0MediaPlayer+0+/octoshape+h+EBU.esc2010.semi1/EBUesc2010semi1 on my machine so you can see it pointing mplayer at the locally served stream). If you want to use VLC there is a FAQ about editing the settings.xml file to get it to execute VLC instead. I assume you could point any other media player or transcoder/recorder at that stream and control it like a puppet on a string.

Lets all get together on the 29th on Freenode IRC channel #eurovision for an evening of europop, yes that sounds good to me.

6 Comments

  • Kasper Henriksen says:

    That’s all fine and everything… except there is no ./Octoshape?

  • Alan Bell says:

    ok, so you download the .bin file, chmod +x and run it, that should expand and create an octoshape folder below wherever you ran the file, in there is the OctoshapeClient program. For me I downloaded it to ~/Downloads opened a terminal, did

    cd Downloads
    chmod +x octosetup-linux_i386.bin
    ./octosetup-linux_i386.bin
    cd octoshape
    ./Octoshape
    ./OctoshapeClient

    uninstalling is just a matter of deleting the octoshape folder.

  • Kasper Henriksen says:

    ********@********:~/bin/octoshape$ ls -1 Octo*
    OctoshapeClient

    They must be serving up different versions to people in different parts of the world, I guess.

    I was wondering if this was a new version because in the past I could never get it to work with Flash, but ./OctoshapeClient (no parameters) seems to work with their Flash demonstration videos.

    • Alan Bell says:

      or, I could be completely wrong. Hang on and I will edit the post . . .

      • Alan Bell says:

        nul points for me. I spent more time slipping in song titles than checking I was giving good instructions 🙁

  • Timo says:

    “Finland… no points!” 🙂

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