Streaming TV!!

I'm sorry if this is illegal - but being stuck in Germany, I had to do something about not being able to watch the Cricket World Cup and I am happy to say I found a solution!

Here's what you need to do:

• Download "sopcast" from here and put it in a suitable place
  
• Download the stdc++5 library also from here
• Extract the files from the library as explained in the README

Now you're more-or-less done. To see a list of available channels, go here. As you can see, the sky is the limit. If you want to view a particular channel, let's say ESPN, copy the ID number of the channel (which at the time of writing this post was 6003). Now navigate to the place you extracted the sp-sc and execute

$ ./sp-sc sop://broker.sopcast.com:3912/$channel_id$ 3908 8908 > /dev/null &

Here, the 3912 might vary, so check the URL of the channel anyway. Replace $channel_id$ with the channel ID. Here 3908 is the local port and 8908 is the player port. Now fire up VLC or any player capable of opening a network stream and open the http url http://localhost:8908/tv.asf.

That's it. Enjoy your show. Oh, if you want to "change" the channel, I can't think of any other way other than doing "killall -9 sp-sc" before repeating the process.