Players¶
Transport modes¶
There are three different modes of transporting the stream to the player.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Standard input pipe | This is the default behaviour when there are no other options specified. |
| Named pipe (FIFO) | Use the --player-fifo option to enable. |
| HTTP | Use the --player-http or --player-continuous-http options to enable. |
Player compatibility¶
This is a list of video players and their compatibility with the transport modes.
| Name | Stdin Pipe | Named Pipe | HTTP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daum Pot Player | No | No | Yes [1] |
| MPC-HC | Yes [2] | No | Yes [1] |
| MPlayer | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| MPlayer2 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| mpv | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| QuickTime | No | No | No |
| VLC media player | Yes [3] | Yes | Yes |
| [1] | (1, 2) --player-continuous-http must be used. Using HTTP with players that rely on Windows’ codecs to access HTTP streams may have a long startup time since Windows tend to do multiple HTTP requests and Livestreamer will attempt to open the stream for each request. |
| [2] | Stdin requires MPC-HC 1.7 or newer. |
| [3] | Some versions of VLC might be unable to use the stdin pipe and prints the error message: VLC is unable to open the MRL 'fd://0'
Use one of the other transport methods instead to work around this. |
Known issues and workarounds¶
MPC-HC reports “File not found”¶
Upgrading to version 1.7 or newer will solve this issue since reading data from standard input is not supported in version 1.6.x of MPC-HC.
MPC-HC only plays sound on Twitch streams¶
Twitch sometimes returns badly muxed streams which may confuse players. The following workaround was contributed by MPC-HC developer @kasper93:
To fix this problem go to options -> internal filters -> open splitter settings and increase “Stream Analysis Duration” this will let ffmpeg to properly detect all streams.
Using --player-passthrough hls has also been reported to work.
MPlayer tries to play Twitch streams at the wrong FPS¶
This is a bug in MPlayer, using the MPlayer fork mpv instead is recommended.
VLC hangs when buffering and no playback starts¶
Some versions of 64-bit VLC seem to be unable to read the stream created by rtmpdump. Using the 32-bit version of VLC might help.