Streaming NASA ISS live on Raspberry Pi

omxplayer is good command line player, will be suing it for streaming videos on Pi, it also support hardware decoding. and also with omxplayer you do not even need to run GUI to watch videos on pi on the console.

$ sudo apt-get install omxplayer

The livestreamer utility helps simplify the process of downloading video from UStream and other video stream providers. It does the processing and converts stream to a standard video file that can be sent to a player like omxplayer.

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
$ sudo pip install livestreamer

---

In order to access ustream’s HD streams, Livestreamer needs python-librtmp, which also is available using pip. The library needs cffi, so we have to install its dependencies, too. They are python2.7-dev and libffi-dev. python-librtmpneeds librtmp-dev.

sudo apt-get install python2.7-dev libffi-dev librtmp-dev

After installing those development headers, we can install cffi and python-librtmp.

sudo pip install cffi
sudo pip install python-librtmp

Once that is done, Livestreamer can be installed.

sudo pip install livestreamer

---

NOW START AND RUN THE STREAMING WITH

$ livestreamer http://ustream.tv/channel/iss-hdev-payload mobile_480p --player omxplayer --fifo

The command that combines livestream and omxplayer and starts the ISS stream in full screen mode is as follows:

$ livestreamer http://ustream.tv/channel/iss-hdev-payload mobile_480p --player omxplayer --fifo \ > --player-args "--win \"0 0 1600 1200\" {filename}"

Finally

To avoid having to manually restart the process each time it stops, a wrapper bash script can be created to do this for us:

#!/bin/bash
while true
do
 livestreamer http://ustream.tv/channel/iss-hdev-payload mobile_480p --player omxplayer --fifo --player-args "--win \"0 0 1600 1200\" {filename}"
done

so If  above file is named iss-streamer make it executable and run it as  command:

$ chmod +x iss-streamer
$ ./iss-streamer

---

I thought it would also be useful to have the stream autostart when the Pi is plugged in, so that it can run completely unattended. This is achieved by adding the command to the /etc/rc.localfile, right before the exit 0 line:

# start the ISS video stream
sudo -u pi /home/pi/iss/iss-streamer >/dev/null 2>&1 &

---

 

THANKS TO:

https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/watch-live-video-of-earth-on-your-raspberry-pi/page/0#

For fixing the issues with python-librtmp, thanks  —   https://cooco.de/installing-livestreamer-with-ustream-support-on-ubuntu-1404.html