Watch TV and Listen Radio with VLC media player

There are several ways to watch online TV and listen Radio channels on line. Most of live streams can be found online by visiting their official web pages or live web telecasters like US stream and live broadcasters like Tune in Radio.

VLC media player is the Swiss knife of multimedia players. VLC can be used to play almost anything (media files) with your PC. it’s completely free open source software.

Why do you want to listen your local radio channel using VLC media player or watch your local TV channels using VLC media player. first thing is you can easily record stuffs you are interested. you will not be disturbed with tons of popup advertisements.

How to install VLC media player

This guide is basically for windows operating system. but you can find your platform specific VLC installer in their official website.

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

download latest VLC media player using above link and install into your PC. It’s very simple and your VLC medial player is now ready to play almost any media format available.

default installation location for VLC is C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN

How to add your local radio stations to VLC

Best place to get live stream details of your local radio stations is Tune In Radio. they offer Tune in app for smart phones. pro version supports recording. if you are not a user of Tune in radio, click here to signup for free account. once you created your free tune in account, you can configure your personal preferences easily. you can search for radio stations based on your location, language, type, etc.then your favorite channels can be added to favorite (bookmark) and can access easily without searching in every login.

now it’s time to add Tune in extension for VLC media player. now go to VLC media player extension page and download VLC extension for Tune in. you can directly download the extension using this link.

What we are interested is file named tunein-v2.lua. you can use Notepad++ to open this file for editing.

you must remember your Tunein user name and password. say that your username is userName@gmail.com and password is 123456

1. Open tunein-v2.lua with notepad++.
2. scroll down to get tunein_radio_config data as following picture.
3. change username and password variable with your user detail
4. save the file

 

Now copy tunein_v2.lua file in to C:\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\sd (or sd folder in your corresponding installation)

1. now open (run) VLC media player.
2. Click on TuneIn under Internet (left hand column)
3. double click on my presets
4. yes, you will see all of your favorite radio stations. it’s time to play or record your favorite program.

 

if you are not a user of TuneIn radio, still you can listen radio with VLC tuneIn extension. but you can not save your preferences. you may need to browse and find your channels, everytime when you want to listen.

How to watch local TV programs with VLC media player

Almost all the TV telecasters do live streaming of their live broadcast (webcast) using their web homepage or using some other web telecasters like www.ustream.com. there is no specific way to find their streaming details. if their webcast is available with usstream, it’s easy. otherwise you need to check telecaster’s live webcast page’s source code (Ctrl+U in most cases, otherwise select view page source) to get stream data. it looks something like “rtmp://xxxx.xxxxx:xxxxx/xxxxxx

this is the stream data of ITN Srilanka  rtmp://mediacp.comcities.com:1935/itn-cdn/default.stream

VLC can not pick and play those rtmp stream data directly from the service provider. VLC needs help of someone who can pipe video streams from various sources into the player.

Livestreamer is a free open source command line utility which can pipe video streams from various sources into the VLC media player. click here to get latest livestreamer. please get windows installer if you are on windows platform. installation is quite straightforward.

lets watch you’re a TV program with VLC. in this case I’m going to use stream from ITN Srilanka.

1. open command prompt in windows.(command prompt)
2. type livestreamer –h and enter
3. if livestreamer is properly installed, you will get available options for Livestreamer
4. type livestreamer rtmp://mediacp.comcities.com:1935/itn-cdn/default.stream and enter
5. you will get available stream quality data
6. then type again livestramer rtmp://mediacp.comcities.com:1935/itn-cdn/default.stream your preferred stream quality data and enter
7. example rtmp://mediacp.comcities.com:1935/itn-cdn/default.stream live

 

now it’s time to sit back and watch your favorite local TV channel with VLC media player. don’t forget to record your favorite TV program.

If your local channel is available on ustream, it’s easy to get live stream data. go to ustream live broadcast page. copy page URL (web address). you can use this address as stream data.

ex. ustream URL of sirasa TV is http://www.ustream.tv/channel/sirasa-tv-live

you can type livestreamer http://www.ustream.tv/channel/sirasa-tv-live and press enter in command prompt.

 

if you are interested to watch Srilankan TV channels, download this batch file and save in to any location of your computer. when you want to watch TV, simply double click on this file. it will prompt with TV options (with sequence numbers). type the desired number and press enter.