You can even watch peer-to-peer television with your Asus eee pc…

The Beijing olympic games are approaching fastly and I was thinking about a way to watch television over the internet with my eee pc. I have practiced and studied martial arts for a long time, and I have the deepest respect for the Chinese culture. Sopcast saved me quite a few times with sport events I was missing on my regular TV.

I found a great article at eee.pc.pl, about qsopcast, a linux client for the sopcast p2p network.

The p2p TV network is based on scheme where users download from each other and share the program among themselves, so the more users are watching a show, the better quality will be.

Qsopcast installation

I would advise the article I mentionned earlier, while it is in Polish it has all the needed unix commands for the installation. They are hosting a xandros and ubuntu linux version as a .deb package (at http://eee.pc.pl/pliki/sopcast/), and you can find two rpm packages (suitable for Mandriva or eeePCLinuxOS) at the official page. A Windows XP/Vista client also exists.

installing qsopcast rpm

You may also need to install mplayer on your eee pc.

TV channels list

We will be hosting a list of TV channels you can add to your qsopcast client. You have click on the Config menu, and click on config again.

add sopcast channels

As you can see on the picture, you can add http://www.eeextra.com/download/channels.xml in Channel URL. Your sopcast client will retrieve tv channels at boot. This list includes many sport programs, Spanish, Brazilian, Asian, movie channels…

Qsopcast is also able to record p2p tv programs and you can even set a time when to start recording and for how long. Quite useful if you are unable to watch a live show.

A picture of the Asus EEE PC in action:

watching p2p tv