Sunday 2 September 2007

TVAnts on Ubuntu

TVAnts is a peer to peer program that allows you to share live streams instead of files.
Although these streams can contain any sort of media they are mostly used for watching live football matches and other events on PCs.


TVAnts pages:

www.tvants-ppstream.com
Official TVAnts page is written in chinese: tvants.com


Installing TVAnts:

Download TVAnts setup program: ( I have obtained this address from official TVAnts page.)
$wget http://88.191.73.231/~cali/tvants/TvantsSetup.exe

We need wine to run TVAnts setup program because it is a microsoft windows executable:
$sudo aptitude install wine       # if you have not already installed wine program.
$wine "TvantsSetup.exe"

It will install itself, and then we will be able to exec the program:
$wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/TVAnts/Tvants.exe
or
$wine 'C:\Program Files\TVAnts\Tvants.exe'


Watching TV:

You will need at least one server at server tab.
e.g: list.tvants.com

At search tab you will be able to search for hundreds of channels.
Select some and add them to channel tab.

NOTE: Do not worry about error messages related to windows media player, we will use mplayer.

You can watch the channel you have selected runing in the console:
$mplayer -framedrop mms://localhost:16900/1
Last "1" means first channel from your selected channels list.
NOTE: Whenever you add a new channel this number increases in one, even if you delete previous unused channels.


NOTE: TVAnts is a peer to peer system so you should open 16800 port on your box to share streams you are watching with other users.

NOTE: You can also watch the tv streams using vlc instead of mplayer.

12 comentarios:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this post! I followed your directions and got TVAnts running perfectly.

Anonymous said...

worked first time thanks output it through vlc instead of mplayer though
thanks

Vicente Hernando said...

It is great to read your comments! :-)

I also appreciate criticism, ideas for new articles, or points to improve the existing ones, etc...

Thank you,
VicenteHA.

Anonymous said...

Thank you!!! :D

one2one said...

Gona test.

Unknown said...

Thank-you very much for this post.

The wget link leads to an outdated version of tvants.
I used http://misc.tvants.com/download/TvantsSetup.exe instead and it runs, however, I get the following error from terminal once trying $ mplayer mms://localhost:16900/1 :


"MPlayer 1.0rc2-4.3.3 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz (Family: 6, Model: 15, Stepping: 10)
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing mms://localhost:16900/1.
STREAM_ASF, URL: mms://localhost:16900/1
Resolving localhost for AF_INET6...
Couldn't resolve name for AF_INET6: localhost
Resolving localhost for AF_INET...
Connecting to server localhost[127.0.0.1]: 16900...
Connected
read error:: Resource temporarily unavailable
pre-header read failed
Resolving localhost for AF_INET6...
Couldn't resolve name for AF_INET6: localhost
Resolving localhost for AF_INET...
Connecting to server localhost[127.0.0.1]: 16900...
Resolving localhost for AF_INET6...
Couldn't resolve name for AF_INET6: localhost
Resolving localhost for AF_INET...
Connecting to server localhost[127.0.0.1]: 16900...
Cache size set to 2260 KBytes
Cache fill: 0.00% (0 bytes)
ASF file format detected.
[asfheader] Audio stream found, -aid 1
[asfheader] Video stream found, -vid 2


MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: demux_open
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
disassembly. Details in DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports_what.html#bugreports_crash.
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug."

Do you think this error is attributed to mplayer or the new version of TVants?

I'll post back once I reinstall mplayer.

Darren said...

Hi

I am also having trouble getting TVants to work on Ubuntu 9.04.

I have installed Wine then TVants then mplayer.

When running the code as advised above I get:
(I assume this may have some thing to do with regedit but not sure how to do this on ubuntu)

Any advise?

$ mplayer mms://localhost:16900/1
MPlayer 1.0rc2-4.3.3 (C) 2000-2007 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1600MHz (Family: 6, Model: 9, Stepping: 5)
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing mms://localhost:16900/1.
STREAM_ASF, URL: mms://localhost:16900/1
Resolving localhost for AF_INET6…
Couldn’t resolve name for AF_INET6: localhost
Resolving localhost for AF_INET…
Connecting to server localhost[127.0.0.1]: 16900…
Connected

Alert! EOF
read error:: Operation now in progress
pre-header read failed
Resolving localhost for AF_INET6…
Couldn’t resolve name for AF_INET6: localhost
Resolving localhost for AF_INET…
Connecting to server localhost[127.0.0.1]: 16900…
Server returned 500:Internal Error
Failed to parse header.
Failed, exiting.
Resolving localhost for AF_INET6…
Couldn’t resolve name for AF_INET6: localhost
Resolving localhost for AF_INET…
Connecting to server localhost[127.0.0.1]: 16900…
Server returned 400: Bad Request
No stream found to handle url mms://localhost:16900/1

Tomas said...

When i start Tvants 1.0 after intstallation from this gfuide (and the one fro their site) it says

"Sorry, the TvAnts software on your machine has expired, lease download new version of this software from our site"

If i say NO! it closes down, if i say YES

" err:winebrowser:get_url_from_dde Unabled to retrieve URL from string L"\""
err:winebrowser:wmain Usage: winebrowser URL
"

:(

Asuka said...

where and how to add the code, $ mplayer mms://localhost:16900/1 ?

Asuka said...

i got the program running, but when i selected the channel and tried to watch, an error came out asking if i wanted to have the default media player to play the file. Then, nothing happened. Please help. It's the last frontier. If completed, i can dump the evil MS windows to Mars.

Anonymous said...

@Darren : to the "mplayer: No such file or directory"...

@Asuka : ... I insyalled VLC Player then : Open > Network > Set "Protocol" to "mms" and type "localhost:16900/1" into Adresse input.

Vicente Hernando said...

@Asuka

When you select a channel tvants tries to open windows media player.

We do not use that program, so instead you need to open a terminal and execute there:

$mplayer mms://localhost:16900/1

or use vlc instead.

mplayer also has a gui if you rather not use the console.