Damn! Trying to update my Zattoo client today I was informed that Linux support is no more. Instead users should switch to Zatto Web TV as an alternative. Which it isn’t. There’s much lesser stations, no EPG, a crappy interface, no fullscreen view and seems to be in early beta.

Everybody knows it: Never change a running System! Except you’re a tinkerer. Because if it isn’t broke you can’t fix it . Hence I decided to perform a BIOS update on my EeePC 1000H. Some might say fortunately others would state unfortunately nothing broke.

I downloaded the BIOS update from http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx and extracted the zip file to 1000H-ASUS-1902.ROM. Renamed the file matching my model number (1000H.ROM) and copied it on a USB stick formatted with FAT16. Always make sure you operate with a fully loaded battery and the power cord plugged in!

I then booted my EeePC with inserted USB stick and pressed ALT-F2 during the ASUS boot screen. All went well and my machine commenced installation. After a couple of minutes I was prompted to press the power butten. I removed the USB stick, rebooted and voilà: BIOS updated!

1. Veetle

Veetle is a very sophisticated high quality video broadcasting service. Besides Windows and MacOS it’s available for Linux. Just download their VLC-plugin for Firefox, install and start watching directly in your browser.

Video quality is great but the software is not widely used for football broadcasts. So despite it’s quality and ease of use Veetle is only used occasionally for your favorite game.

2. Sopcast

GTK-sopcast runs natively under Linux. Just install the provided .deb file and have fun. Sopcast can also be run from the command line:

sp-sc sop://broker.sopcast.com:3912/6000 3908 8908

starts sopcast playing channel 6000 on your local port 8908. In order to watch this channel with mplayer just enter

mplayer http://localhost:8908/tv.asf

Video quality depends on bitrate but is most likely much lower than Veetle or TVAnts broadcasts. However chances are much higher that your desired game is available on Sopcast.

3. TVAnts

TVAnts is not available for Linux. The Windows .exe can be downloaded from here. You will need WINE to install and run Windows programs like TVAnts. WINE can be installed via Synaptic or by typing sudo apt-get install wine via the command line. I’m not going into detail about what WINE can or can’t do but it suffices to run TVAnts.

Install TVAnts with wine TvantsSetup.exe although be aware that the name of the install file might differ. Just use that which you downloaded. After the installation process finished depending on distribution and window manager you are able to start TVAnts via your graphical menu or by typing

wine 'c:/Program Files/TVAnts/Tvants.exe'

on the command line. Now just choose your channel from the channel tab. You will get an error about TVAnts not beeing able to find Windows’ default player. Of course. We’re not using Windows, are we? But it also tells us how to play the stream:

mplayer http://localhost:16900/1

can be utilized – again – on the command line. If you add more channels in TVAnts please replace 1 by the number of the channel you’d like to watch. Also please note that even if you remove one or more channels from the channels tab channel numbers keep increasing until you restart TVAnts. For example if you have three channels running, you remove them and add one further channel you will only have one channel running in TVAnts. Until you restart completely you will have to tell mplayer to play channel 4.

If you find a link on a website pointing to a TVAnts stream just copy it’s location (e. g. tvants://list.tvants.com/tvants/?k=79ed1f19fb51593f5391d8d7c3e6f478) and manually enter this URL via TVAnts -> Channels – Add button.

Video quality is generelly better than Sopcast but TVAnts needs 5-10 minutes to establish connections and stabilize the stream. So be patient. Availability of broadcasts using TVAnts is also quite good.

If you don’t like mplayer you might consider using VLC to play your streams. Just replace mplayer with vlc in the examples above.

I was slightly disturbed when looking at the video playback performance of my EeePC 1000H. Heavy video tearing all over the place, not much fun at all. After a little searching I was able to circumvent the problem by using the video overlay port with mplayer. Let me shed some light:

xvinfo delivers information on textured video and video overlay and the associated ports

Adaptor #1: "Intel(R) Textured Video"
port base: 58


and

Adaptor #0: "Intel(R) Video Overlay"
port base: 57

port 57 (can be different on other machines or installations) is what we’re looking for. In order to force mplayer to use this port simply start with

mplayer movie.avi -vo xv:port=57

or more conveniently add the following to ~/.mplayer/config

vo=xv:port=57

to have mplayer always use video overlay.

If I resume from suspend on my nx8220 having suspended over the Log-Out menu the screen will not be locked. Being heavily paranoid I got slightly nervous. I found myself digging about in screensaver and power-manager settings but didn’t seem to be able to solve this annoying issue. The solution came by accident: using FN+F3 and hereby suspending via the designated keyboard shortcut does the trick!