Worldcup Preparations
The football world cup is starting today and it surely is going to be the biggest sports event of the year. We all know that some television channels are going to stream the world cup live on the Internet for their countrymen while others may only show the matches on television. If you are not that tech savvy and still want to view the cup online your best bet is to download a software called pplive. I suggest the stable version but experienced users could use the beta version as well.
Install pplive on your system, make sure you chose English as your language. The options should appear at first start and you can change some settings like ports, connections and the like. Click ok or hit enter to leave the options. Select Play from the menu and you see a channel list on the left, probably lots of garbage if you don't have the appropriate fonts installed on your system. But this does not matter.
The important channels are the following:
CCTV1, CCTV5 and probably Shanghai Sports
All three seem to be showing all games of the football world cup live. Take a look at the boxtobox website for a complete schedule of the games and which station is broadcasting it. (Update: no longer available)
I suggest you take a look at this tool if you can't watch a match on TV.
Update: Download the latest Tvuplayer version from Rapidshare and select the channel ESPN2, they show the games live and it's working. Downloads also available from Badango and Rapidsharing.
Update 2: I compiled a list of frequently asked questions that help you resolve issues that you may experience while you are using the product.
Update 3: If TVUplayer does not connect you have the option to download either TVants or Sopcast and watch the world cup or other sport events using those programs. (CCTV 5 is the channel, unfortunately with Chinese commentary)
Update 4: The world cup has ended, but since one is played every four years, you may come back to this article to get the latest information regarding the upcoming world cup. I'd like to point out a couple of changes that have taken place in the mean time.
Recently, live football streams have moved from being almost exclusively available in p2p video streaming applications like TVU Player or Sopcast to the world wide web. While you still find some matches using P2p software, you will find the majority of matches only on the web. Check out out list of football scheduling sites that list where you can watch the matches online.
Good news is, instead of installing a software to watch football or other sports, all you need now is a web browser and Flash to do so.
Update 5: TVU Player has been discontinued and we have removed all links pointing to it from this article.
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Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?