One of the clients I downloaded to watch sport on the net was Octoshape and isn’t so much a client as a plug-in for Windows Media Player and Adobe Flash (That’s why you couldn’t find any Octoshape icon on the desktop, he-he. Ed). Stoopid editor, I’ve just found an Octoshape icon hanging around and when started does suggest a load of TV channels. I’ve just started one of the channels and its got to be one of the best quality P2PTV players I’ve yet seen and which plays in Windows Media Player.

It does grid cast streaming which turns every users PC into a server pushing data back onto the grid, I guess. That also means the users incur the cost of shoving data back onto the net all the time the Octoshape process is running. P2P in all its glory. The EULA is quite interesting in that it prohibits users from monitoring their own data traffic. Huh. How’s it going to stop me doing that? It can’t, but what you will see probably won’t be pretty.

Another criticism is that as the PC is now acting as a server then the usual narrow uplink stream will be choking on Octoshape data so there’s not much point in running torrent clients at the same time. Back to the EULA: ‘Octoshape reserves the right to expand the scope of what its software does on listener’s computers’. Sounds creepy. I can see ISP’s terms of service being changed to prohibit this stuff.

I got TVants to work. This is a TV client, written by a university in China, and is supposed to be a bit of a pain to get working. I got lucky, it worked straight out of the box. I’ve also managed to get Sopcast working as well as TVUPlayer. Next I’ll see if I can get PPStream, PCast, UUSee and heaven knows what else to work. Good fun.

There was a BBC story the other day about how people are able to watch live football free on the internet. That kind of story generates loads of interest and no doubt inspired a lot more people to see if they can do the same. Dunno if that was the idea of running the story but it certainly inspired me for most of the weekend.

I found a couple of sites that have links to lots of matches and helpfully also had links to download client software, which is needed for some matches. A lot of matches are broadcast from plain old web pages, for instance www.iraqgoals.com/en/ch1.html. This specific site shows English matches with English commentary and it has 5 channels.

There are numerous clients to download and some of them were from China and written in Chinese, though I did manage to install them. Sopcast is a client that comes recommended and worked well on Vista but not at all on XP. I say it didn’t work on XP, it definitely didn’t show any football but it did work hard at not displaying anything. When I checked the running processes in Task Manager Sopcast was using 50% of the CPU. It’s possible that I had an older version of Sopcast on the XP machine.

Several matches tried to use Windows Media Player but on both operating systems they failed. Dunno if this is a codec problem. Other clients I downloaded were TVants, PPLive, PPStream, Octoshape and TVUnetworks. The last of which actually has a client for the iPhone – called TVUPlayer – but which only works with wi-fi. On Saturday I was able to watch a live Spanish league match on the iPhone which was pretty darn impressive. When testing the various clients and streams I was able to have 5 screens of streaming data running and displaying with no lag.

Now I just need a bigger screen.

Quote from Barack Obama on election night ‘If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer’.