TV on My PC (Aliant)

I may be the only person in the world who cares about this, but here it is anyway.

Aliant is the local phone company in the Atlantic provinces, and they are also my ISP (DSL). For years, they have provided a service called TV on my PC. This offers 10 streaming TV channels through their own web interface with an embedded Windows Media Player.

For some reason, they have decided not to support Windows Media Player 11. This means everyone with Vista.

I needed to come up with a workaround right now, because Roland Garros is starting Monday, and TSN is covering it. TSN is one of the channels offered on TV on my PC.

So, I found the media player links in the web page:

mmst://172.16.101.2/comdy
mmst://172.16.101.2/space
mmst://172.16.101.2/star
mmst://172.16.101.2/tech
mmst://172.16.101.2/ctvnn
mmst://172.16.101.2/mm
mmst://172.16.101.2/mmm
mmst://172.16.101.2/newsw
mmst://172.16.101.2/oln
mmst://172.16.101.2/tsn

And I found out that those mmst:// protocols work with the VLC media player.

So install VLC, run it and go to "file".. "network stream".. "http/https/ftp/mms" and in the URL box, put in one of the addresses above - in the case of TSN, it's "mmst://172.16.101.2/tsn".

Or, better yet, create a desktop shortcut to

"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" mmst://172.16.101.2/tsn

Of course, this will all break when they change the IP address, but until then it works fine.

I don't know for sure, but I think this only works in New Brunswick, and I think it only works for those on the Aliant network.