I was forwarded a link to boilerroom.tv earlier and was amazed by the quality of the live audio/video stream. I wanted to sit and watch/listen, but I was trying to do about 8 other things at the same time. I wondered if I could get the feed to play through VLC and then float it above all other windows; after a little googling I discovered an excellent little python tool called livestreamer, which was really quite painless to get up and running.

Installation

Following the tutorial, I cloned the git repository to my laptop (git was already installed on my machine):

git clone git://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer.git

I then installed python-setuptools as it’s required by livestreamer:

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools

Installing the livestreamer tool was then as simple as typing:

python setup.py install

Running livestreamer

When the program was installed, I had to find the stream URL. Using Google Chrome, I pressed F12 to open the Developer Console, clicked the ‘Sources’ tab, then the ‘Show navigator’ below the ‘Elements’ tag. I discovered a link to cdn.livestream.com and under this, a boilerroom.tv link, which I right-clicked and copied:

http://cdn.livestream.com/embed/boilerroomtv?layout=4&color=0xe7e7e7&autoPlay=true&mute=false&iconColorOver=0x888888&iconColor=0x777777&allowchat=true&height=555&width=940

After truncating everything after the question mark following …boilerroomtv, opening the feed in vlc (livestreamer defaults to this, and it was already installed on my machine), took the following statement:

livestreamer http://cdn.livestream.com/embed/boilerroomtv/ best

Everything was done in about 20 mins, and the stream was definitely better quality than in the browser (this machine is quite old and resource heavy pages oft slow it down). Score.