Watching NCAA Mens Basketball Tournament Online with Linux
I’m a big North Carolina Fan – have been for almost as long as I can remember. So, I was of course pleased to see cbs doing full coverage of the entire list of tournament games online. My first hesitation though is that so many online outlets give a proprietary windows only access “install our activex plugin to view” kind of solution. I can’t tell you how happy I was to see no such requirement from CBS. So, on my linux laptop I’ve been watching the tournament (at times full screen.) Now, the viewer in the webpage doesn’t seem to allow for full screen (and the quality frankly isn’t quite good enough to sit CLOSE and watch full screen…), but… here’s the software I’m using.
I use Firefox for my web browsing and with the mplayer or vlc browser plugin I’ve been able to view the tournament games just fine (I do have the win32 codecs installed as this is a windows media stream.)
I really wanted to take it fullscreen though and the catch is that finding the correct address for each game could be a tedious pain. So, it turns out there’s a great firefox plugin for that… mediaplayerconnectivity with that the embed video box has an icon, you click the icon and it opens in an external browser. (And I should add the media location is pretty easy to get then for other streams.) It’s also nice that you can take it fullscreen.
As much as I like mplayer, I’m really starting to see vlc as a great media swiss army knife as well.
Good luck in viewing the tournament. I have a link to the cbs page in my Live and on demand sports online page.
