What's this you say? Sports you seek?

Yarrr!  Well I'm not usually one for spending an afternoon watching the big game however a good friend had inquired about watching sports on the computer, especially games that are blacked out or otherwise unavailable.  Not having been involved with that aspect of entertainment I delved into a search of what the Internet could provide.

  

Through my searches I found a lot of dead-ends and have thrown out a lot of feelers that I am still waiting to hear back on but in the meantime I've found a rather reliable way to stream the games in less than steller quality, although definitely watchable. 

This method involves a couple of programs you'll need to install and a website to bookmark.  The program you'll need is StreamTorrent and Veetle.  There are a couple of other programs but these seem to be the most reliable. 

StreamTorrent is a novel implementation of the Bittorrent protocol (which I'll dive deeper into in my next post) that distributes the video file in realtime.  In the programmer's own words:

"StreamTorrent is a free tool for streaming to unlimited users with serverless peer to peer technology."

You can read a pretty good review here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/the-geek-blog/watch-streaming-tv-with-streamtorrent/

This method is pretty good for finding random shows (Scuba TV is pretty sweet) but unless there are several people watching simultaneously be prepared for buffering and pauses.  Also you may want to brush up on your Chinese because that's what most of the channels are.

So how in the heck are you suppose to find the big Monday night game when you can't read chinese?  That's where http://www.myp2p.eu/ comes in.  The best thing about this site is there is no registration or sign-up.  Just bookmark a couple of sites and check them when there's a game you want to catch.  MyP2P takes all the hard work out of it.  

It's as easy as installing StreamTorrent at http://groups.google.com/group/streamtorrent?pli=1

and going to http://www.myp2p.eu/index.php?part=sports

Find the game you want to watch and click where I indicated in the picture above.   Once you click the link it will

take you the MyP2P forums that will have active links to the game.  Here's an example of what it will look like

I've circled the game I want to watch and you'll notice that most of the links have ST and a number in the link.  ST stands for StreamTorrent and the number is how good the quality is.  The higher the number the better the quality.  So I can get the game in 700k which isn't too bad.  Just click the link and let StreamTorrent work its magic.

So far every time I've used StreamTorrent it looks like it doesn't work and gives an error message like below:

However, you'll notice it says Buffering at the bottom and within a minute or two you should see that number climb

Now if all goes well you should watching the game at the same time as the rest of the world.  Of course it doesn't look quite as good as the hi-def feed but if you're in a pinch or the game is blacked out and you wouldn't have any other way to watch it the method will work.

From time to time on MyP2P you'll see a link that says Veetle next to it.  This is a pretty cool good quality streaming website that has a custom player that is so far virus free :-) .  Also its a great way to watch ESPN2.  Just head on over to http://veetle.com/

What's that you says, ESPN2?  Why sure I'll check that out.  Click on the link, if you are using Chrome (which you should be because it's the fastest most secure internet browser on the market) it will prompt you to download and install their player.  Install it and refresh the page by pressing F5 and voila!

Of course, who the heck is interested in Women's softball when Star Wars is on!

                             

The Internet sure has come a long way!