Since almost a year foreign news agencies that contradict EU war propaganda have been banned from public broadcasts and censored online. Germany has the worst censorship laws of all western coutries, giving the government immense powers to criminalize all journalism it deems as misfit. Many German independent journalists and bloggers already had to flee the country years ago, leaving mostly only sham journalists behind that blindly swallow narratives pushed by the state without contradicting or criticizing them.
The criminalization of journalism in Germany has forced RT news to stop online-streaming specifically to German IP addresses. This is distinctly different from the blanket EU ban of RT, which only grants the EU censorship powers within the EU, but doesn't make it a crime per se to perform journalism in other countries and offer it from there.
Fortunately you can still watch RT on platforms such as Rumble and Odysee (LBRY), which are dedicated to uphold our now-abolished basic fundamental democratic freedoms such as freedom of the press, and won't be bullied by rogue states such as Germany making outrageously anti-democratic demands and threatening them with fines. Although there are LBRY/Rumble plugins for Kodi, they only work for normal videos but not livestreams (at least on the Kodi version I use).
However, you can manually download the livestream playlist and then play it with Kodi on your TV:
- Open the page that contains the livestream
- right-click the white background of the page, then choose "Inspect"
- Go to the "Network" tab
- Press F5
You should now see "playlist.m3u8" (or similar) in the list of files. If not, then press the play button in the player to play the video.
- Right click "playlist.m3u8", Copy link address, then paste it in the browser and download it.
- Edit playlist.m3u8 with a text editor. It should contain three lines with new m3u8 files. All you have to do is to add the full "playlist.m3u8" web URL in front of the new m3u8 files (but without the "playlist.m3u8" at the end). Like so:
#EXTM3U #EXT-X-VERSION:3 #EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=1063000,RESOLUTION=640x360 https://rumble-foxo.cdn.rumble.cloud/live/hr6yv36f/slot-30/ngrp:srak-wx8r_all/chunklist_b978000.m3u8 #EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=2713000,RESOLUTION=1280x720 https://rumble-foxo.cdn.rumble.cloud/live/hr6yv36f/slot-30/ngrp:srak-wx8r_all/chunklist_b2478000.m3u8 #EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=4528000,RESOLUTION=1920x1080 https://rumble-foxo.cdn.rumble.cloud/live/hr6yv36f/slot-30/ngrp:srak-wx8r_all/chunklist_b4128000.m3u8
Please do not copy the above example from my website directly, since it changes and stops working every few months.
- Now simply save this file on your Kodi box in the video folder and open it from the UI.
Please keep in mind that RT is a Russian propaganda outlet, very similar to how DW or France24 are German and French propaganda outlets respectively. RT's big appeal has always been to provide high-quality independent journalism, take sides with democratic movements, key activist, represent the interest of the people and of course to be able to criticize governments and their policies. It then intermixes this very desireable and legitimate journalism with Russian propaganda narratives. Conversely, almost everything broadcasted by DW is propaganda-driven and nothing it broadcasts has any sort of journalistic integrity to it, other than what it needs to make state narratives sound more legitimate. In the current world of struggling, bancrupt, state-funded and malleable legacy media, RT is just too much of a stronghold. Watching RT makes you aware of how the Russian propaganda works, which in turn makes you aware of how the domestic propaganda works. It makes you sceptical and ask simply questions such as "why am I shown those events specifically?", "who is showing them to me, who profits from me believing in this?", "what events are left out of the picture?". Those are the actual reasons why the EU wanted to get rid of RT.
Please note that the website RT.com is also censored in Germany via DNS. If you live in Germany, you have to use Google DNS servers (8.8.8.8). If this is too complicated for you, you can also use the TOR browser.