There are many browser plugins out there which allow us to stream good quality video content, such as Flash and Silverlight. Traditionally we would need to install these manually through Wine – which can get messy!! Unfortunately I need Silverlight in order to watch BT Sport…which is a Microsoft project – so its quite unlikely they’ll be releasing a Linux version in the future 😉

I have recently come across a nifty little program called Pipelight, which takes the pain out of things. It does have a dependency on Wine so, if not already installed, you’ll need to do so. So far I have only tried this on Ubuntu 12.04.

Installing Wine

To install Wine, simply type these commands into you’re Terminal.

 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine

You can configure it with.

winecfg

Installing Pipelight

To be able to stream the BT Sport channels on you’re Ubunutu 12.04 Desktop you will have to install one of the special browser plugins which in our case is the browser plugin Pipelight.
This is key as the Pipelight program allows you to use Windows only plugin inside you’re linux browser.

On Ubuntu 12.04

To install PipeLight on Ubuntu, simply open up you’re terminal and type the following commands.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends pipelight-multi
sudo pipelight-plugin --update

After installing piplelight and pipelight-multi they will also install the core fonts for Mircosoft, as Silverlight requires them. If you don’t already have these, during the installion you will be asked to accept a license agreement while pipelight is installing. (just press ‘Enter’ to accept.)

Using and Configuring Plugins

If you just ‘pipelight-plugin’ (or ‘pipelight –help’) at the command line, you will be greeted with a screen like below.

daryl@daryl-Dell-DXP061:~$ pipelight-plugin 

Usage: pipelight-plugin [OPTIONS ...] COMMAND

Environment variables:
  MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH             overwrite plugin path

Options:
  --accept                    accept all licenses

User commands:
  --enable  PLUGIN            enable plugin
  --disable PLUGIN            disable plugin
  --disable-all               disable all plugins
  --list-enabled              list enabled plugins for the current user
  --list-enabled-all          list all enabled plugins
  --system-check              do a system check
  --help                      shows this help
  --version                   shows the current version of Pipelight

Global commands (require root rights):
  --create-mozilla-plugins    create copies of libpipelight.so
  --remove-mozilla-plugins    remove copies of libpipelight.so
  --unlock PLUGIN             unlocks an additional plugin
  --lock   PLUGIN             locks an additional plugin
  --update                    update the dependency-installer script


Supported standard plugins:
  silverlight5.1
  silverlight5.0
  silverlight4
  flash
  unity3d
  widevine

Additional plugins (experimental):
  shockwave
  foxitpdf
  grandstream
  adobereader
  hikvision
  npactivex
  roblox
  vizzedrgr
  viewright-caiway
  triangleplayer
  x64-unity3d
  x64-flash

As you can see, there are a few supported plugins. For now, I am only interested in Silverlight.

You’re plugins by default should all be disable but just incase you can check this by entering the follow command to you’re terminal.

pipelight-plugin --list-enable-all

To install the Silverlight plugin, you simply:

pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight5.0

While i was configuring my plugin’s for the first time, i had enabled silverlight5.1 and was the only plugin i had enabled. I tried then watching BT Sport but failed then had to disable 5.1, as shown below.

pipelight-plugin --disable silverlight5.1

Rescources

Installing Wine

Official Pipelight site:
http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html