In case you haven't noticed yet, NASA has put a new experiment on the ISS, which is called the HDEV (High Definition Earth Viewing)experiment.You can watch it online via ustream.

Playing stuff in a browser is cool, but having it play in mplayer seems way more flexible (and can also benefit from video offloading). To grab the stream from ustream and play in mplayer2 you can use https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer, which works very well.

The next level is to use xwinwrap to put the stream on your desktop, instead of a static image. When you've got alpha blending/compositing in your terms (xterm/urxvt etc.) you can even see it in the background of your shells (way awesome).

When you've installed livestreamer and xwinwrap, just call it like this:

$ livestreamer -Q http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iss-hdev-payload best \
--player "./xwinwrap -ni -fs -s -st -sp -b -nf -- mplayer2 -wid WID -nosound