streamlink is a fork of Livestreamer (currently no longer has development), Streamlink if it still has development and This is based on a plugin system that allows you to easily add new services. Therefore, this is a tool compatible with popular live video streaming services, like YouTube, Dailymotion, Livestream, Twitch, UStream and many more.
Furthermore, Streamlink nallows you to watch video streams online on popular media players, such as VLC, MPlayer, MPlayer2, MPC-HC, mpv, Daum Pot Player, QuickTime and OMXPlayer, etc. All this through the use of the command line.
This tool is We can run it on systems like Windows, Linux and MacOS, so its main goal is to help users avoid buggy and / or CPU-heavy flash plug-ins to enjoy a great video streaming experience.
This tool it's free and open source so we can access its source code in the following link where the developers share it, the link is this.
Among the features that we can find in Stremlink are the following:
- Multiplatform
- Free and open source
- API
- Support for multiple video transmission platforms
- Support for multiple video players.
- It has support to add plugins
- Support for avi / mov VOD stream for rtve.
How to install Streamlink on Linux?
The installation is quite simple, since some of the most used distributions already have this program within their repositories, but without further ado I leave you the commands so that you can install it.
Install Streamlink on Ubuntu and derivatives
To install Streamlink in Ubuntu and any derivative of it, it is necessary to add a repository for this we must open the terminal ctrl + alt + T and execute the following.
First we must add the following repository:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
We update our list
sudo apt update
And finally we install with the following command:
sudo apt install streamlink
Install Streamlink on Debian
In the case of Debian in the testing branch it is already within the repositories so we only have to install it with:
sudo apt install streamlink
But for the other versions we must add the following:
wget -qO- "https://bintray.com/user/downloadSubjectPublicKey?username=amurzeau" | apt-key add - sudo echo "deb https://dl.bintray.com/amurzeau/streamlink-debian stretch-backports main" | tee "/etc/apt/sources.list.d/streamlink.list" sudo apt update sudo apt install streamlink
Now for the other distributions it is already within the repositories.
Install Streamlink on Archlinux and derivatives:
sudo pacman -S streamlink
Install Streamlink on Fedora, Red Hat, CentOS openSUSE and derivatives:
sudo dnf install streamlink
Install Streamlink on Gentoo
emerge net-misc/streamlink
How to use Streamlink on Linux?
The use of this program is relatively simple, I will leave you here some of the most commonly used commands by Streamlink.
For example, if we want play some live broadcast:
streamlink linkdelatransmicion [/ sourcecode]
It would be as follows:
streamlink twitch.tv/day9tv
With this, it will respond with something like this, where it shows us the resolutions available for playback.
[cli][info] Found matching plugin twitch for URL twitch.tv/day9tvAvailable streams: 360p_alt, 480p_alt, 360p (worst), 480p, 720p, 1080p (best)
Another case if we want to see a video in the same way we just add the url:
streamlink youtu.be/_lf0d9Rib-8
Now on the other hand if we want the video to be played on a particular player We only have to add the following parameter –player with which we indicate with which player the video will be opened
streamlink --player mpv youtu.be/_lf0d9Rib-8
In case we indicate some particular resolution We must only add the resolution we want to the command, for example it would look like this:
streamlink --player mpv youtu.be/_lf0d9Rib-8 1080p
Also Streamlink supports the Login on various sites, an example that I leave you is for crunchyroll
streamlink --crunchyroll-username=xxxx --crunchyroll-password=xxx http://crunchyroll.com/a-crunchyroll-episode-link
If we want use some proxy:
streamlink --http-proxy "http://user:pass@10.10.1.10:3128/" --https-proxy "socks5://10.10.1.10:1242"
Finally, if we want to know in detail about this tool, we can visit this link or run the following command:
streamlink --help
In conclusion, I must say that it is an excellent tool to avoid the use of the browser and save a bit of resources and it will only not allow you to enjoy our online videos without some other distraction.