streamtorrent and mac os x in china

Watching sports is never easy. bulls bowing out in the conference finals. the mls at anytime. it just doesn't get any easier when you move to china. last night i tried to load up the iowa vs iowa state game, but the only way to view it was through a stream torrent link. initially i naively hoped to find it via some flash streaming site on the web. first of all, many of the popular flash sites are blocked. second of all, the big ten network is vigilant about protecting their investment. most of the old faithful aggregators dont even list games shown on the b1g network anymore. what they have done is come up with an almost reasonable plan to stream games to paying customers around the globe with no territory restrictions. well, that would be nice if i still had some way to pay, but i dont. so that leaves one option: streamtorrent.

streamtorrent is infamous among mac users. until now there is no mac port of the software which means we have to create some ridiculous workaround to view the torrents. it took some fiddling but in the end, after 3 quarters of football plus pregame, i figured out how to make it work. the first method i tried was to use Wine. wine allows users to run windows executables within os x without needing a fully licensed copy of ms windows. the best thing about wine is that it is reliable and free. unfortunately, after installing the newest version of stream torrent and windows media player 9, i couldnt get stream torrent to connect to a channel nor could i retrieve a list of channels even though i could browse through internet explorer. after much frustration with wine, i tried using CrossOver. crossover is very similar to wine, but it is more feature-rich than wine. in fact, it runs on the same idea as wine. crossover isnt free, but you can get a fully functioning free trial from the interwebs. in crossover, i also installed windows media player 9 and the stream torrent. this time, it loaded the stream player, but it never connected to the stream host. the only option left i could think of was to try virtualization instead of "emulation."

 there are lots of different virtualization programs out there. at the suggestion of wiziwig.eu forums, i went with the free program, Virtualbox. the only problem with virtualbox is that you need a copy of windows, which is the reason i avoided virtualization in the first place. then i found this website. it is a blog with some great instructions on how to get streamtorrent up and running on os x. the process simply contains the following steps:

1. download virtualbox
2. download microxp-stv2.ova
3. install virtualbox
4. import microxp into virtualbox
5. start the virtual machine with microxp
6. load up a streamtorrent link

unfortunately i didnt have time to wait for twinkilling's premade version of microxp so i downloaded a different basic version. i dont know exactly what he did to microxp, but i simply installed windows media player 11, streamtorrent, firefox, and vlc. i loaded up my stream and everything worked as it should. after a few minutes of buffering and adjusting the buffer time, i got to watch some of the game. then it really began to give me problems buffering. after a few minutes passed it began to buffer indefinitely even after it reached 100% and 120 seconds buffered.

in the end, it was pretty disappointing even though i *kind of* got it to work. now, i'll try to download twinkilling's version of microxp and see how it goes. check out his step-by-step tutorial if you need more in-depth guidance. it has clear instructions along with pictures and links to virtualbox and microxp.

twinkilling's - how to get streamtorrent to work on mac os x