Watch any NFL game! (Sopcast on Ubuntu)

UPDATE (February 2009):
You can now ignore the rest of this post and simply download and install sopcast and sopcast-player. Both are listed on the sopcast page, but rather than manually installing and moving sopcast, just download both as deb files from Jason Scheunemann's google code page and double click to install. You will need to install the sp-auth deb first and then sopcast-player.

Sources:
Sopcast-player (install everything you need from here)
Sopcast (not really needed)


The old instructions:
Sopcast allows you to watch any NFL game (or other games for that matter). To get it working on linux and ubuntu, do the following:
1. Download and install VLC using synaptic.
2. Download sopcast for linux from their site. I only needed the sp-auth.tgz file. I did not need the stdc++5 library.
3. Unzip the file.
4. In the new unzipped folder, you will want to move the file named sp-sc-auth to /usr/bin. I think the easiest way to do this is to run the command:

sudo nautilus

This will open a new file browser and you can move anything anywhere. Just close the file browser and terminal when you are done.

At this point, you have two options. The easy option is to install a script, the second is to run everything from the command line.

As stated, the first way is to download and use Chickamade's script:
1. Download the newest version here. There are already good instructions under details on the site but I did have to change a couple of things.
2. So after you have downloaded the file, unzip it. Similar to above, run "sudo nautilus" and then move the "sopcast" file from the new unzipped folder to /usr/bin.
3. In firefox, type "about:config" (without quotes) in the address bar. Then right-click the screen and choose New-->String.
4. In the first field that comes up, type in:

network.protocol-handler.app.sop

In the next field that pops up, the value field, type:

/usr/bin/sopcast

5. Finally, the first time you click on a sop link somewhere, firefox should ask you how you want to open the link. Alternatively, you can go into Edit-->Preferences-->Applications and click on sop. Either way, ignore the default and tell firefox to open the sop link with sopcast by pointing firefox to /usr/bin/sopcast.
6. Now when you go to a site like MyP2P or Sopcast Channel List and click on a sop link, it will autmatically open VLC.

The second method is to ignore this script and simply open the streams through the command line. For this method, do the following:
1. Go to a site like MyP2P and find a sop stream you want to watch. Right-click on the link and copy the link location.
2. Now open a terminal and run the following:

sp-sc-auth linklocation 3908 8908 > /dev/null &

Replace "linklocation" with the sop link you copied from the site. Also, for information, the "> /dev/null" portion of this command gets rid of any output from the command and the "&" tells it to run the command in the background.
3. Next, open VLC. Go to File-->Open Network Stream. In the HTTP line, type:

http://localhost:8908/tv.asf

4. You should now see the stream. The only catch is that when you close VLC, it doesn't also stop the sp-sc-auth process. For this, you have to go to System-Administration-->System Monitor and stop the sp-sc-auth process.

There is also a third super easy method:
1. Download and untar/unzip the linux version of sopcast from their site as described in steps 2 and 3 in the first section.
2. Rename the sp-sc-auth file to sp-sc.
3. Move the sp-sc file to /usr/bin with the "sudo nautilus" command.
4. Download Sopcaster here. It is a very simple gui to run sopcast.
5. Untar/unzip the sopcaster download and move the sopcaster file inside to /usr/bin.
6. Now just make a launcher for the command "sopcaster."

Sources:
Sopcast download
Sopcast script
MyP2P
Sopcast Channel List
Sopcast Instructions
Sopcast script Ubuntu forum post instructions
Sopcaster gui