This weekend is one of the biannual General Conferences of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS or Mormon Church). It's a chance for us to hear timely counsel from the inspired leaders of our Church, including men we believe to be God's prophets.
We have an Nintendo Wii hooked up to our TV, so I wanted to find a way to watch General Conference through it. The Church's website has a streaming video player, as well as a link to a low-resolution mms stream. I have WiiMC installed on our Wii, and the low-res stream works in it, but has a bit of lag and is low-res (not that it matters that much when you're just listening to people talk). After some poking, though, I found the source of the video in the streaming player. The current stream (Saturday morning session, October 2011) is at http://bcldshd-f.akamaihd.net/satameng_1_400@43919?videoId=1190841497001. I'll update this today and tomorrow if it changes.
I expect that this url will work with other devices, e.g. XBMC on the Xbox, the PS3, and possibly various set-top boxes.
Update: Someone emailed me to ask how to actually use these urls with WiiMC. Here' s the answer.
Guess I kind of left out the most important part, huh? Sorry about that. Assuming you installed WiiMC onto your Wii's SD card, just pop out the card and put it in your computer. Open the file apps/wiimc/onlinemedia.xml in a text editor. Put in a line like
<link name="Saturday AM" addr="http://stream2.lds.org/stream/satam/eng/ios.m3u8" />
where the addr field is the url.
Update: I was having problems with WiiMC, so I switched to Mplayer CE. Open menu.conf and put the line
<e name="LDS General Conference" ok="loadfile mms://a1119.l12520051118.c125200.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1119/125200/v0001/reflector:51118"/>
after
<cmdlist name="userdef" title="User-defined" ptr="<>" >
<e name="../" ok="menu cancel"/>
Update: Saturday afternoon (October 2011) - http://bcldshd-f.akamaihd.net/satpmeng_1_400@43919?videoId=1190861917001
Update (29 Mar 2012): I've noticed that this post has had a lot of traffic over the past few days. I'll get new stream urls up ASAP on Saturday.
Update: Saturday morning (March/April 2012) - mms://a1119.l12520051118.c125200.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1119/125200/v0001/reflector:51118
It looks like this will work for the whole weekend, but I'll update here if there are any changes.
Update: October 2012 - It looks like the media link is now posted on the Church website. Go to http://www.lds.org/general-conference/live/languages?lang=eng and copy the link for Windows Media in your language of choice.
