I missed the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Chinese Communist Party for two reasons; the first being that I was in bed, and the second being that we don’t have CCTV (China Central Television) at home. CCTV 9 (China’s official English language channel) is available worldwide. In the UK it is available on Sky as part of the package of free-to-air channels. Unfortunately we don’t have Sky TV so we are forced to try and watch online. Nice try, but unfortunately the CCTV website is very Mac unfriendly and none of the plugins required to watch the video (even with Firefox) worked. If you are on Windows you will probably have more luck.
60th anniversary celebrations aside, without access to the full range CCTV channels I was missing out on a valuable source of real Chinese language to help me learn in my quest to learn the language. I’m sure I am not alone and so I’ve put together a quick guide to watching CCTV online on any platform.
- If you haven’t got it already, download and install VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)
- From the File menu select Open Network
- Enter the URL of the channel you want to watch (see below)
- Press “Open” and wait while the video starts playing
- Press Command+F to watch in full screen
| Channel | Category | URL |
|---|---|---|
| CCTV 1 | general | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv1 |
| CCTV 2 | finance | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv2 |
| CCTV 3 | arts, entertainment | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv3 |
| CCTV 4 | international (cn) | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv4 |
| CCTV 5 | sports | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv5 |
| CCTV 6 | movies | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv6 |
| CCTV 7 | children, military, agriculture | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv7 |
| CCTV 8 | tv series | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv8 |
| CCTV 9 | internation (en) | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv9 |
| CCTV 10 | science, education | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv10 |
| CCTV 11 | chinese opera | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv11 |
| CCTV 12 | society, law | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctv12 |
| CCTV News | news | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctvnews |
| CCTV Children | cartoons | ? |
| CCTV Music | music | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctvmusic |
| CCTV HD | high definition | mms://cctv-live-cctv1.wm.llnwd.net/cctv_live_cctvhd |
You can find more information on CCTV on Wikipdea (thanks to qimet888). If anyone knows the address of the HD streams for each of these channels or the address of the Children’s channel, please share them in the comments and I’ll update the table.
Great Bill, thanks. Works perfectly.
I took it one step further, I book-marked each of these channels. I had to use a temporary bookmark, and overwrite the http: it with the mms: (because it won’t bookmark MMS, oddly). Then I associated Firefox with VLC, and now I can launch a channel as easily as a website – thanks!
Greg at Mandarin Segments
Awesome! Works like a charm! Thanks!
Thanks for posting this Bill
I haven’t done this for a while, the streams seem considerably more stable and reliable than they used to but I guess better broadband connection etc. help out.
Good tip from Greg there.
It gets even better you can record the stream to your hard drive as you watch it. It takes a bit of experimenting and used to be a little flaky in older versions of Videolan but probably better now.
Select the Advanced options stream/save and configure via the advanced settings, you can play locally and save to file at the same time. Generally I find turning buffering on (the default works ok) and selecting an encapsulation method but leaving the video/audio encoding options to default works best.
You may need to experiment depending on platform sometimes it is a bit flaky, for some reason .asf worked best on Windoze and mpeg4 on Linux but play around. Pull up another filebrowser if the new savefile you selected appears where you expect and the filesize keeps growing then it should be working. If your saved file doesn’t open in another media player it should almost certainly work if you play it back in Videolan. You can record hours of Chinese telly this way (YAAAAY).
Thanks Chris.
Somewhere on my laptop are a bunch of settings that allow me to record to an iPod compatible format. If memory serves me well, this was a two step process. If ever I find them again, I’ll be sure to update the post with further details. VLC is a great little utility, thanks for sharing the ability to record streams. It is worth pointing out that this process is almost identical for recording audio streams, so any radio fans out there should be able to record streaming radio just as easily.
Does anyone use Boxee? I was thinking of trying to package up the CCTV streams as a Boxee channel. I’ve never done this before, but if someone would find it useful, I’m willing to give it a go.
@Bill Perfect works like a charm. Very happy to use this on my MacMini. Hopefully we can find new channels (HD or regional channels, like BTV-Beijing TV and Chongqing TV).
@Greg your explanation helped also for bookmarking the channels
The recording stuff i still have to find out.
But very happy with this post. Will retweet it again (i guess i did before).
Thanks a lot. Will you put it on the mandarinmonday site?
David
thanks, because in beijing i don’t have a tv.
Someone knows for the channel xingkong 星空 ？
hi, i am having problem with cctv1 only, it worked before, but no more, everything works great with other cctv channels, just the first one, just can’t connect, Can anyone tell me what’s wrong? here is the log i saved.
[moderated:] log file removed
I removed the log file from the comment as it was quite long and would be more appropriate on the VLC support forums. If anyone thinks they can help or would like to see the log file, I’ll be happy to post it somewhere more appropriate.
From the messages it contained it seemed as if there was no data being returned by the stream. At a first guess I’d say that something was up with the stream and not your set-up or the method provided here.
I have just tested the CCTV1 stream and it seems to be working fine now.
i just wonder how long you can watch CCTV each time, mine is just a few minutes, and it just stopped, any suggestion?
I’m actually in China at the moment so I have access to more CCTV than anyone could wish for. I’ll have to try again when I get back to the UK. In the past I’ve been able to stream for several hours with no issue.
cctv现在大部分都改为p2p模式了，直接连接只是在1套，4套，还有新闻和一些外语台还有，我用freebsd，所以无法p2p，也想找直接连接的方法…
29/05/10:
Has anyone else noticed that the cctv9 stream has stopped working? It plyas about 10 seconds of a news report on exports then goes dead.
CCTV 4 is still working for me here in the UK, but am missing the CCTV9 stream. Anyone else with the same issue?
10/06/10
CCTV9 is back online at its original address – excellent news!
Awesome news. Thanks for updating us
I can confirm it is working now.
I think that all of these are dead apart from 9 now.
Not quite – in the UK, CCTV4 and CCTV9 are still live, but for some reason in the past few days, I’ve lost the sound on both streams?
I’m having the same issue. A quick look and I can’t see anything obvious. Wonder if CCTV has been messing around with their streams.
Maybe.. but for the moment, sound is back on CCTV
Thank you very much Bill. I am a Linux user and as you have mentioned CCTV live is Mac and Linux unfriendly. I am in China trying to learn Hanyu.
Would love to hear more about your studies. Get in touch any time.
Hi. You can contact me by e-mail whenever you want.
I am in China but the streaming is very bad. VLC player stops after a few seconds and does not start again because of the streaming.
It doesn’t appear that CCTV takes the reliability of their streaming content too seriously. If the streaming is bad in China, it can only be a whole lot worse for those of us overseas.
cctv4 and 9 work. But others don’t. Do we need use proxy? Or are there other ways available to stream CCTV?
No proxy should be required (assuming you have a direct connection to the internet and arent testing this from a corporate environment). I’m currently on the wrong side of the firewall for testing this and don’t have easy access to a mac. Quite often streams disappear only to reappear a few days later.
Is anyone else able to test this?
Hello. I have found this web site where you can watch Chinese TV stations from and is Mac and Linux friendly, see here http://bbtv.cn/
If CCTV does not want to be Mac and Linux friendly, then we should look for other web sites. Best wishes!
trying to find a way for my mom to watch the CCTV-1 gala online tomorrow from the Boston area in the US – we have a mac in her house – seems really tough to find a way to access CCTV-1 .. tried VLC today without luck (get several error messages).
any tips/advice would be much appreciated!