Oddly enough, I’ve recently become addicted to Euro Truck Simulator 2, a very good trucking simulator. One of the great features of the game is that it has built in suppport to play MP3 streams within the game. It comes prepacked with a bunch of European stations, but I wanted to add some of my local stations that are on iHeartRadio.

This led to two problems: finding the stream URL and then transcoding the stream to MP3.

Getting the stream#

This is a very varying step since each stream might be streamed through different applications, but in general you can do some packet inspection to find out the stream source. In my case, someone very kindly compiled a TSV file of stations on iHeartRadio along with their stream URLs. Unforauntely, these streams are not given in MP3.

Transcoding#

One of my favorite applications that is very commonly installed these days is VLC which came quite in handy here. Once you have the stream URL, follow these steps:

  1. In VLC go to Media -> Stream…
  2. Select the Network tab and enter the URL
  3. Click Stream button
  4. On the next screen click on Destination Setup
  5. Under Destinations -> New Destination option select HTTP
  6. Click Add
  7. Leave the default options or change Port from 8080 if it’s in use
  8. Ensure that Active Transcoding is checked.
  9. Under Transcoding options -> Profile select Audio - MP3
  10. Click Stream
  11. Note that the stream URL is now http://localhost:8080 (or another port you selected)

Simply repeat these steps for any stream you want transcoded. Once you have setup this stream in the game you will not have to redo the configuration in the game.

Adding stream to game#

  1. Open My Documents -> Euro Truck Simulator 2. Open the file live_streams.sii in a text editor.
  2. Copy and paste the last line that looks like stream_data[###]: “http://someurl:8080| Name” on the line below it.
  3. Change the ### to the next sequential number and the URL to be a valid MP3 stream. Change the stream name after the | (pipe) to be Localhost or another distinctive name.