Michael Kratz

Discovery is yet again on-orbit (STS-120). Space walks are happening, and bits and pieces are getting shuffled around and added to the International Space Station. I’ve always enjoyed watching bits and pieces of the various shuttle missions on NASA TV, but the thing that has become annoying lately is the lack of a decent high resolution/bit rate NASA TV stream.

The streams from the NASA TV site are rather dismal and don’t come anywhere near the kind of quality one could potentially obtain over a broadband connection. It annoyed me so much, I went hunting for better quality….

After digging around for a while I came upon a forum post linking to a 1200kbit/sec Yahoo stream of NASA TV. Here’s the link, clicky, my advice is to copy that link and then use VLC to play the stream (File, Open, paste it in, click ok).

An important thing to note, is that apparently this stream only runs when the Shuttle is on-orbit. So if you regularly watch the NASA TV stream when the shuttle isn’t on-orbit, then you’ll need to drop back to one of the lower quality streams.

On the topic of NASA TV and high quality streams, there’s a great article here about NASA TV using High Definition (HD). Mmmmm, NASA TV HD… that would be nice.

• Here’s a link to the thread where I found the link to the Yahoo 1200kbps stream.
• NASA TV Website
• NASA Spaceflight Website
• Yahoo NASA TV 1200kbps stream