Livestreamer
============
Livestreamer is a CLI program that launches live streams from various streaming services in a custom video player.

Currently supported sites are:

* GOMTV.net
* Justin.tv/Twitch.tv
* Ongamenet
* Own3d.tv
* SVTPlay
* UStream
* YouTube


Dependencies
------------
Livestreamer and it's plugins currently depends on these software:

* Python version >= 2.6 and >= 3.0 (currently CPython and PyPy is known to work)
* python-setuptools or python-distribute
* python-requests (at least version 0.12.1)
* python-pbs
* python-argparse (only needed for Python version < 2.7)

For RTMP based plugins:
* librtmp/rtmpdump (git clone after 2011-07-31 is needed for Twitch/JustinTV plugin)


Installing (Linux, OS X etc)
----------
Make sure you have at least Python and python-setuptools then run:

    $ sudo python setup.py install

This should install any missing Python dependencies automatically if they are missing.


Installing (Windows)
--------------------
1. Install Python
2. Install Python setuptools
3. Get rtmpdump and unpack it somewhere (rtmpdump-20110925-git-6230845-win32.zip from the downloads section should work)
4. Add these paths to your Path environment variable:
 * [Python path]\
 * [Python path]\scripts\
 * [rtmpdump path]\ (or specify full path with --rtmpdump option)
 * [VLC/mplayer/other path]\ (or specify full path with --player option)

5. Open a command prompt and change directory to livestreamer source, then run:

    python setup.py install

This should install any missing Python dependencies automatically if they are missing.



Using
-----
    $ livestreamer --help


Common issues
-------------
**livestreamer errors with "Unable to read from stream" or "Error while executing subprocess" on Twitch/JustinTV streams.**

When building rtmpdump from source it may link with a already existing (probably older) librtmp version instead of using it's own version. On Debian/Ubuntu it is recommended to use the official packages of *librtmp0* and *rtmpdump* version *2.4+20111222.git4e06e21* or newer. This version contains the necessary code to play Twitch/JustinTV streams and avoids any conflicts. It should be available in the testing or unstable repositories if it's not available in stable yet.


**VLC on Windows fails to play with a error message.**

VLC version 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 contains a bug that prevents it from reading data from stdin. This has been fixed in version 2.0.3.


Saving arguments AKA config file
--------------------------------
Livestreamer can read arguments from the file ~/.livestreamerrc (POSIX) or %APPDATA%\livestreamer\livestreamerrc (Windows).
A example file:

    player=mplayer
    gomtv-username=username
    gomtv-password=password


Using livestreamer as a library
-------------------------------

http://livestreamer.readthedocs.org/