ESPN 360 Video with Linux

As a customer of ESPN360 I’m happy to be able to watch the live Sportstreams with linux, apart from other services using WMP for playback and encryption. But I noticed a few things which may bother others, too.

Because of the buggy pluginwrapper in Opera, it’s not fun to watch with my favourite browser. The wrapper often breaks down and stays at 100% cpuload (Dualcore Opteron 1800 MhZ), so I searched for better ways.

First thought goes to Firefox, because it is the second most used browser and many plugins are adapted to it, but I had some trouble with discontinued pictures and short stoppages in the play. Also, the cpu-load is nearly on top with the stream running.

So I give Konqueror (from KDE 4.1.3 and 4.2) a shot and - it works! The cpuload is also pretty high, so this could be a problem of the flashplayer (10) itself but Konqueror maybe use less ressources than Firefox, so that the stream works flawlessly.