How to Watch Live Olympics on Linux

CCTV2 (thanks to Steve):
sop://broker.sopcast.com:3912/15103

Here’s how you can watch the Olympics live on Linux:

Note: You can also use sopcast to watch the Olympics under Windows but I am not going to talk about Windows sopcast here as I don’t use it.

Step 1: Get VLC
Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install vlc

Other distros; go to http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Step 2: Get sopcast, extract it and go to its folder

wget http://download.sopcast.cn/download/sp-auth.tgz
tar xvzf sp-auth.tgz
cd sp-auth

Step 3: Launch p2p sopcast stream
Usage:
./sp-sc-auth sop://[sopcasturl] [shareport] [streamport] > /dev/null &
List of streams: http://www.sopcast.org/channel/
Full list in XML: http://www.sopcast.com/chlist.xml
More streams on Google
Note: Not all streams have audio
Note 2: If sp-auth is giving out an error, you might need to download the stdc++5 library link: http://www.sopcast.com/download/libstdcpp5.tgz
Example:

./sp-sc-auth sop://broker1.sopcast.com:3912/48608 3904 8904 > /dev/null &

Step 4: Fire-up VLC, open network stream http://localhost:[streamport]/tv.asf
Note: you might have to wait 20 seconds or so before it allows you to connect to the stream

Screenshots:

vlc-sopcast-screenshot

Ubuntu sopcast olympics screenshot