Streaming Video Playback

Streaming Video Playback Notes:
===============================

For quite a while I've been searching for software that plays live streams on Linux, especially after I stopped using flash on browsers and realized that sites like Twitch doesn't support html5 (yet) and so is kinda unusable. Luckily I discovered livestreamer, which solves all of my problems and supports various other streaming sites and not just limited to twitch.

Main deterrent for people towards livestreamer is that it is mainly commandline and doesn't have a gui or frontend to be usable or to be appealing to anyone other than geeks. Anyway here's the run down of what it's like, it certainly is feature rich and not that difficult to work with. Perhaps in the future I can code a frontend but for now work with this.

- Install livestreamer from your package manager
- Run live streamer in the following format:
livestreamer --hls-segment-threads [number of threads] --player "vlc --file-caching=[value in range 1000-10000]" "url" [quality]

livestreamer --hls-segment-threads 4 --player "vlc --file-caching=5000" "http://www.twitch.tv/esl_csgo" high


Important:
==========

Argument: [quality] Denotes the stream quality to be used for playback. Available options are usually [audio, mobile, low, medium, high, source] ranked in terms of higher quality.

Argument: --hls-segment-threads followed by the number of threads, creates multiple threads to grab the stream at the same time and increase data throughput. Decrease the amount of threads if you have a slower connection. If you do no use this argument, there can be buffering, etc. so it is necessary for a smoother playback, especially with a higher quality stream. Also hls is stream type for twitch, for other sites you might have to just look at what type of stream the site supports like hls / http / rtmp.

Argument: --player "vlc --file-caching=5000" enables cache management so that the video appears less choppy and results in smoother playback. I personally prefer vlc for media playback, if you use mplayer the arguments will be different. Refer to livestreamer docs for more info.