Ace Stream enabling the streaming of videos using P2P (peer-to-peer) technology – specifically BitTorrent protocol – and is especially useful for live streams, but also works for Audio and Video on Demand, and IOTT (Interactive-Over-The-Top).
Ace Stream is implemented in a fork of VLC (Ace Player HD) working in Windows, Linux and Android, and I’ve found Full HD quality to be higher than services like YouTube, and with less buffering provided enough users watches the stream.
It’s easy to use in Windows, and there used to be an Android app installable from the Play Store but it’s been removed, possibly because of the association of the solution with piracy. But just like Kodi, it’s up to do what you want to use it for. Using Ace Player was easy in Ubuntu up to version 14.04 thanks to a ppa, but with Ubuntu 16.04 it become a little more complicated as you had to installed the engine (that’s manage P2P connectivity) from a ppa, download some binaries from another source, and integrate all that with Kodi.
That would work, but since you normally have to copy/paste an Ace Stream content ID (e.g. e816ef1a6206bc0b5e6b95e1f84b185a78d7ad81), and Kodi does not support copy/paste it’s not ideal. I think there’s a reddit scrapper add-on to automatically get the ID, but I did not try it. Another solution was to install the Windows version in Linux using Wine, again not ideal, and I would not always work.
But recently, I found out a snap was released for it, and now everything is much easier in newer versions of Ubuntu or Linux Mint. So I could install it in Ubuntu 16.04.
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sudo apt install snapd sudo snap install acestreamplayer |
Installation is done 🙂
Now you can launch the engine in the background:
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acestreamplayer.engine --client-console |
and run Ace Player HD from the command line:
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acestreamplayer |
or the dash. You’ll need to find an Acestream content ID for what you want to watch using a search engine or specific site with the stream you are interested in.
Let’s try one for Aljazeera English and another for Russia Today both of which should be legal streams worldwide (I guess). Click on Media->Open Ace Stream Content ID, and paste your selected content ID (Aljazeera English below):
Click on Play and within a few seconds the live TV should be playing.
That stream works well, but with only 720×576 resolution, so let’s switch to Russia Today HD instead:
The quality is much better with a 1920×1080 25 fps stream with 8 to 9 Mbps bitrate.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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AceStream has about two legal channels and the rest are all pirate (and rather Russian viewer oriented) so it’s rather disappointing to see an article recommending it on this website.
Interesting! Especially since I have woked with the development of peer2peer streaming for embedded targets in the past. But had never heard about ace before today.
Acestream is used for many purposes, not only piracy!
I’m just glad that exists a p2p stream solution still able to survive the telecom’s barriers and blocks.
I use it a lot when traveling.
@Hugh Chazz
so you are disappointed because it doesnt appeal to your moral high ground .. get a life.
Thanks cnx, this is very cool.
Ты пидарас просто.
How to install Acestream on Armbian(legacy kernel) + Opi boards ?
I’d suspect this would not work out of the box.
I can see some port for Acestream engine on Arm Linux:
https://github.com/sshmanko/acestream-armv7
https://github.com/miltador/cheapstream
But nothing about the player. The player source code is available @ https://bitbucket.org/AceStream/acestreamplayer/src, so it might be possible to port Ace Player to Arm platforms with some work.
The best bet on Arm is probably to go with Android though.
Also another interesting project: https://github.com/pepsik-kiev/HTTPAceProxy (or https://github.com/rtfpessoa/aceproxy) which allows any IPTV app (ie installed in an smart TV) to view acestreams via the proxy, being the server installed in a cheap/low resource media server (ie mine is in a raspi 2B)
I wanted to try it out too, but the player was out of date for arch linux. This worked for me though: https://github.com/jonian/acestream-launcher
Fascinating.
Is there a plugin available for Kodi?
Also, any player integration into Armbian?
Why recommend Russian propaganda BS?
Its about tech, dumbass.
Because you president like it!
As if we hadn’t lived all our lives with American propaganda BS
P.S.: I’m european
So psyched that it’s a snap now, although appimages seem even better. One less reason to boot into windows. Still trying to get it in my menu so I can launch it like other programs, but to have it on Linux at all is great.
Just because the technology is used for piracy does not make the technology bad or articles about it would promote piracy. P2P is here to stay, no matter what we would do. I wonder if this could be used for private streams, to set up a local server for the family. It would be a sort of a private family stream.
When I run this line “acestreamplayer.engine –client-console”
I have this error:
“Command ‘acestreamplayer.engine’ is available in ‘/snap/bin/acestreamplayer.engine’
The command could not be located because ‘/snap/bin’ is not included in the PATH environment variable”
How can I do?
Thanks
Maybe try to make sure “‘/snap/bin’ is included in the PATH environment variable”
Something like
export PATH = $ PATH; / snap / bin
bash: / snap / bin: This is the directory
————————————————
so, what is next?
Add all the commands in order, for beginners, please, I hope it is not difficult for you to do?
export PATH=$PATH:/snap/bin
The command ‘acestreamplayer.engine’ is available at ‘/snap/bin/acestreamplayer.engine’
The command could not be found because ‘/ snap / bin’ is not included in the PATH environment variable.
acestreamplayer.engine: command not found
——————————————————————
Hi, I would like to know what to do about it? Will you help me?
LinuxMint 19.1 Tessa
It is not working on MX Linux