Setting Up An Acestream Proxy

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Acestream seem to provide the best quality online streams, but as its essentially video over bittorrent, its not really the kind of traffic i want on my home network. This is a rundown on setting up an Acestream proxy on another host. This will output a stream you can just load up in VLC.

Once you have complete this, i would suggest you take a look at my post on scaling up the proxy, available HERE

Pre-requisites (installing acestream)

We need to install several packages and the acestream-engine itself.

So, to start with, lets install the basic packages we need:

jon@stream-origin:~$ sudo apt-get install python-gevent python-psutil git vlc

Once thats complete we need to install the Acestream engine.

jon@stream-origin:~$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following line

deb http://repo.acestream.org/ubuntu/ trusty main

Install the publickey for the repo

sudo wget -O - http://repo.acestream.org/keys/acestream.public.key | sudo apt-key add -

Update and install

jon@stream-origin:~$ sudo apt-get update
jon@stream-origin:~$ sudo apt-get install acestream-engine

Thats it for installing acestream and the pre-req’s. Next we will configure the proxy itself.

Getting the proxy

A nice chap going by the github username – ValdikSS wrote this software, so all thanks go to him.

Now, lets get it downloaded.

jon@stream-origin:~$ git clone https://github.com/ValdikSS/aceproxy.git

Whenever you want to update the proxy, just run “git pull”

Configure the proxy

Next we need to go through and configure the proxy. There are a few changes we need to make:

Open up aceconfig.py and set the following vlcuse = True

It is recommended to also set the following:

videodelay = 0
videoobey = False
videopausedelay = 0

That should be all you need to do.

Now onto running the proxy.

Running the proxy

Now that the proxy is configured, lets try it out. There are a few programs that need to be started before hand. Id suggest having a couple of terminals up, just while we are testing. Once you are happy they are working you can push them to the background.

First we need to start VLC:

jon@stream-origin:~$ vlc -I telnet --clock-jitter -1 --network-caching -1 --sout-mux-caching 2000 --telnet-password admin

Then we need to start the Acestream-engine

jon@stream-origin:~$ acestream-engine --client-console

Once they are both started, lets start the proxy:

jon@stream-origin:~$ python acehttp.py

That should be it. You can test its running by going to ip of your machine, plus the port set in aceconfig.py then /stat. So for example http://192.168.0.100:8080/stat.

This should then show you the connected clients, and the max concurrent connections.

Viewing a stream

Now we get to the actual watching a stream. This is all on your local machine. Not the proxy. Firstly, you need to know the acestream hash of the stream you want to watch. Im not going to give out links to where you can find them, but google is your friend.

All you need to do is open VLC, go to “Open network Stream” and put in the following

http://ip-of-proxy:port/pid/acestream-hash/stream.mp4

Thats it. The stream will load up in VLC.