guide to watching football on the net
mods delete if this is a problem but asd far as i know its not illegal to watch on the net as the streams are provided by the TV companies who are showing the matchs.
Fixtures:
Saturday:
15:00 GMT Southampton vs Norwich
Star TV (LFF TV link) (Coolstreams Test Sports)
15:00 GMT Liverpool vs Middlesbrough
ESPN China (LFF TV link) (Coolstreams)
Guangdong TV (Coolstreams)
Shaanxi Sports (LFF TV Link)
17:00 GMT Bolton vs Chelsea
ESPN China (LFF TV link) (Coolstreams)
Guangdong TV (Coolstreams)
Shaanxi Sports (LFF TV Link)
Sunday:
14:00 BST Tottenham vs Aston Villa
Guangdong TV (Coolstreams)
Shaanxi Sports (LFF TV Link)
16:00 BST Charlton Manchester United
ESPN China (LFF TV link) (Coolstreams)
Shaanxi Sports (LFF TV Link)
20:00 BST West Bromwich vs Arsenal
ESPN China (LFF TV link) (Coolstreams)
Shaanxi Sports (LFF TV Link)
Introduction
With the crazy technology these days, it is now possible to watch live football matches on your computer. No longer do you need sky, here you can see all the sky matches, and more!
In this document I will explain in detail exactly how to watch live football on your computer.
Firstly, you must have a broadband internet connection. If you don’t, feel free to try but it almost certainly won’t work.
There are two methods for watching football on your computer, firstly watching a stream and secondly using coolstreaming (more explained later). I shall explain in detail exactly what you need and how you can do this.
Internet Streams
Generally these can be found on the internet fairly easily.
You will need various things:
1. A broadband connection. 512k will be fine, but obviously the faster the better. To see what kind of speeds you're getting from your ISP then check your Internet Connection Speeds from this link – http://www.adslguide.org.uk/tools/speedtest.asp
2. Various media players.
Most streams require winamp. This can be downloaded from here http://www.winamp.com.
Other media players which would be very useful include Windows Media player (WMP) (download here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download) and Real Player (download here: http://uk.real.com/player/?&sr...uk.rp.rp.hd.def).
Internet streams are easily identifiable by there address name.
If the stream ends in .asx, the stream is a winamp stream. The address must be copied, winamp opened, file and open URL pressed, and the address must be entered in there. The stream should play. Winamp streams are by far the best! (eg http://people.freenet.de/yoshi7/streams/sxtv1.asx)
If the stream begins with mms., the stream is a WMP stream. The address must be copied, WMP opened, file and open URL pressed, and the address must be entered in there. The stream should play. (eg mms://61.139.33.106/espn-1my181999)
If the stream ends with .ram, or begins with RTSP. the stream is a Real Player stream. The address must be copied, Real Player opened, file and open URL pressed, and the address must be entered in there. The stream should play. (eg http://www.rts.co.yu/rts2live.ram)
The stream should now buffer. This will be in percent and will go from 0-100%. This is just the stream loading and buffering is quite a good thing.
If the stream doesn’t buffer, something is wrong. Either you have entered the wrong address, the server doesn’t exist or the server is full. This depends entirely on the message which is displayed.
What happens if your stream constantly buffers making the stream un watchable!
Buffering is generally caused by the load of users connected to that stream, in which the more users the not so good streaming will occur whereas the fewer users connected to the stream the less buffering you will get. This should not happen though if you're on a High Internet Connection such as 1 Meg + as this is a very high connection and anything from this and above you should be receiving really good quality of streams.
There are various things you can do to try and reduce buffering.
Winamp
Open winamp then options/preferences/input, then click on nsv decoder then configure. You can then adjust your buffer from there. Again, remember not all computers are alike, some put all 3 to 60,000, others don't go that high, adjust to what suits you.
Windows Media Player
Go to Tools, Options, Performance (Tab)
Connection Speed
Choose your connection speed: (This will be a connection below your current connection)
DSL/Cable (768kbps)
Network Buffering
Buffer 40 seconds of content
Many people have had different success with the different settings on this in which ideally you can play around with it to see what suits your connection best in which I would recommend something of around 40 as this is what I personally have and everything seems to go smoothly for me although I do get slight buffering at times.
After applying the above settings on the Performance Tab in Windows Media Player go to the Network Tab and make sure you have the below settings applied:
Multicast - Ticked
UDP - Ticked
TCP - Ticked
HTTP - Ticked
Use Ports - Ticked, 7000-7007 to receive data.
With these settings hopefully you can kick back open a Beer and watch the streaming of whatever you want to watch.
Real Player
Go to Tools, Preferences then Connection.
Do much the same as above!
But how do I actually find a stream
Quite often, a stream will be posted in Les’s match updates thread on a match day. But if it doesn’t work or you can’t find one, there are various options.
1. Free sites. There are loads of free stream sites on the web, one of which is run by BBSer CPFC Town http://www.livefootballfree.com/ This is a very good site!!. Unfortunately, the streams from free sites tend to be quite random, poor quality and unpredictable and they often don’t work. But you get what you pay for! These often operate mostly be stealing streams from pay sites. CPFC Town assures me that his site doesn't do this. I very much apologise for tarring him with the same brush as many of the others.
2. Pay sites. Sites such as www.freelivefootball.co.uk offer dependable, high quality streams. This costs just £2.99 for a whole 12.5 months to be a member of and the service is great.
Within the next few months, pay sites will be able to protect their streams. This will prevent stealing, and will give their members higher quality streams and make the free sites redundant.
The commentary is in Chinese, what should I do.
There is nothing that can be done about this unfortunately although the internet radio can be used.
Go to the BBC website and press “Live commentary”.
Open this up in Real Player.
The stream is likely to be about 3 minutes behind. This can easily be synched.
Using a stopwatch, time the lag between the radio and the stream. For example, when Alan Green says “ Ashley Cole clears for a Palace corner”, start the watch. When you see Ashley Cole clear for a Palace corner, stop the watch and note down the time.
In Real Player you can pause the commentary. Pause the radio commentary for the required length of time!
I recommend that you connect to the stream ideally 30 Minutes + before the game actually kicks off oh and don't forget if you have a firewall it may be a good idea to disable it as the firewall may be preventing your stream to work.
You might want to install DIVX Codec's, as they are very useful, you can download them from: http://www.divx.com/divx/download
Only install the Codecs not the actual DIVX Player if your wishing to continue using Windows Media Player, as this is what I've done and its pointless having the DIVX Player unless you want it. Basically the codecs allows the playing of certain files.
Coolstreaming
Coolstreaming is a program which you install on your computer. This program allows you to watch sports channels from around the world.
It works in a similar way to bit-torrent. The more people watching, the better the streams.
The image on here is usually very good quality but the video must be left for about 5-15 minutes to allow the stream to settle.
How to set up
Download coolstreaming from here http://coolstreaming.org/download.htm
Download VLC player from here http://download.videolan.org/pub/vi...0.8.1-win32.exe
VLC is another media player (similar to WMP) but it works really well with coolstreaming.
Install them both
Open coolstreaming
In cool streaming change the preferences (2nd icon from right shown as a hand with a piece of paper) so that the application to open asf files reads C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe
You will have a list of channels, scroll down and double click on ESPN and wait for it to open up in vlc player
Wait for 10 to 15 mins for the stream to sort itself out
You need a connection higher than the stream quality/bit rate. For example for the espn link to work (280k) u need a higher internet connection than that. Test sports (330k) will need a 1mb broadband or higher to work.
ENGLISH COMMENTRY NOW AVAILABLE ON ESPN
Double click on the speaker icon in your system tray, move all the way to the right and hey presto
