Saturday, October 1, 2011

Watching LDS General Conference on the Nintendo Wii (and other devices)


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.   


10 comments:

Warren Orthodontics said...

will you be updating this for the October 2012 conference?

Matt said...

I'll try to. I got a new TV with a VGA-in, so I may just hook my laptop up to it, but if I get a chance I'll try finding the stream.

Matt said...

See update.

Bailey B. Stewart said...

Do you know the link for today's conference session?

Matt said...

Same as last year. mms://a1119.l12520051118.c125200.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1119/125200/v0001/reflector:51118

Owen Welling said...

mms://a1119.l12520051118.c125200.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1119/125200/v0001/reflector:51118

this link appears to be to the lo-res version. when I attempt to use the "link" provided for the LDS player (http://www.lds.org/general-conference/watch?lang=eng) WIIMC says it's an error... any idea what the link is for the Hi-res stream?

Matt said...

This file links to sources for different resolution streams: http://ldshd-i.akamaihd.net/hls/live/200743/gc04132/eng/master.m3u8
The .m3u8 file is a playlist, which links to other playlists, which link to the video streams. I don't mind the low-res, so I'm not going to spend more time on it, but let me know if you find something that works.

Anonymous said...

how did you get Wii MC on you Wii?

Matt said...

Ben & Windy - http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_Channel

Hiattech said...

Any updates on 2014? I'm noticing there's no low-res links anymore . . . so how do I get this in?