Michael Kratz

Notes, Interesting Facts, Helpful Hints, Whinges and Rants.

High Bitrate NASA TV Stream

October 31st, 2007 | Category: Broadband,Internet,NASA,Space,TV

Image taken from the NASA websiteDiscovery 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.

11 comments

11 Comments so far

  1. Bill in Warwick, RI, USA May 14th, 2009 3:07 am

    Sweet! Currently watching the Hubble being grappled. Found your link just in time to see it in better resolution. Thank you very much!

    - Bill

  2. Ballpeen June 2nd, 2009 3:17 am

    Thanks for the higher quality link!

    (Found it with google)

  3. Craig Seeman July 14th, 2009 1:16 am

    Thanks for the link :) Works great!

  4. Phil October 9th, 2009 6:50 pm

    How did I miss this before? Thanks!

  5. Heaven January 3rd, 2010 4:31 am

    This is great, Thanks!

  6. leon February 12th, 2010 8:52 am

    thank you for the thread.
    I enjoy watching the space walks in higher definition

  7. perspective » Blog Archive » NASA TV : flux vidéo haut débit April 5th, 2010 3:27 am

    [...] Via Michael Kratz [...]

  8. Steve May 15th, 2010 2:06 am

    Thanks for the link. We got rid of out directv and comcast does not offer nasa tv. Great link. Great quality.

  9. EvilHom3r October 23rd, 2010 11:14 pm

    Hey, just want to let you know about this ustream (ugh) I found that streams NASA HD. Since it is ustream, I don’t think it’s true HD, but it’s surprisingly good quality.
    Only downside is it requires flash and has ads (some of which can be blocked)…

    popout player:
    http://www.ustream.tv/channel-popup/nasa-tv-hd

    channel:
    http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-tv-hd

  10. Mike in geosynch orbit February 25th, 2011 8:39 am

    Thank you! Currently watching STS-133 on its final journey. gotta fight back the tears!

  11. Nick February 26th, 2011 7:25 am

    Great, many thanks for the information :-) I loved watching the last launch of Discovery using the higher def feeds

    Nick

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