Livestreamer is a CLI program that launches live streams from various streaming services in a custom video player and also a Python library that allows you to interact with the stream data in your own application.

Current release: 1.4.1 (2012-12-20). See CHANGELOG for release notes.

Currently includes plugins for these sites:

• Dailymotion
• GOMTV.net (live and VOD)
• livestream.com and new.livestream.com
• ongamenet.com
• own3D.tv
• SVTPlay (live and VOD)
• Twitch/Justin.tv
• UStream
• YouTube

... and many more. See livestreamer --plugins for the full list!

UNIX-like OSes Pip is a tool to install Python packages from a central repository.

sudo pip install livestreamer

Windows Download the installer from the Downloads section.

Note! If you have previously installed manually you may need to remove livestreamer.exe from PYTHONPATH\Scripts.

Livestreamer is command line interface, you must use it from a terminal/command prompt.

See livestreamer --help for all the options and usage.

Livestreamer can read arguments from the file ~/.livestreamerrc (UNIX-like) or %APPDATA%\livestreamer\livestreamerrc (Windows). The file should contain an argument per line, like this:

player=mplayer -cache 2048
gomtv-username=username
gomtv-password=password

Most plugins are straight-forward to use, just pass the URL to the stream and it will work. However, some plugins are using what could be called a "meta URL" to find the stream for you.

• gomtv Passing the URL gomtv.net will make the plugin figure out what match is currently playing automatically.
• ongamenet To use this plugin the URL ongamenet.com must be passed.

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 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 standard input. This has been fixed in version 2.0.3.

Streams are buffering/lagging

By default most players do not cache the input from stdin, here is a few command arguments you can pass to some common players:

• mplayer --cache <kbytes> (between 1024 and 8192 is recommended)
• vlc --file-caching <milliseconds> (between 1000 and 10000 is recommended)

These arguments can be used by passing --player to livestreamer.

UNIX like OSes From the source tree run:

sudo python setup.py install

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 (separate with a semicolon):

• PYTHONPATH\
• PYTHONPATH\Scripts\
• RTMPDUMPPATH\ (or specify full path with --rtmpdump option)
• PLAYERPATH\ (or specify full path with --player option)

5. From the source tree run python setup.py install. This should install any missing Python dependencies automatically.

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

• Python (CPython >= 2.6 or >= 3.0 or PyPy)
• python-setuptools or python-distribute

These will be installed automatically by the setup script if they are missing:

• python-requests (version >= 1.0)
• python-sh (*nix, version >= 1.07) or python-pbs (Windows)
• python-argparse (only needed on Python version 2.6, 3.0 and 3.1)

For RTMP based plugins:

• librtmp/rtmpdump (git clone after 2011-07-31 is needed for Twitch/JustinTV plugin)

http://livestreamer.readthedocs.org/