MLB.TV in Linux

floydwilde · 08-09-2008, 07:14 AM

I'd been hoping a nice utility like this would get written. I just found today when doing a google search on 'mlb.com linux'. Had been listening to my Cubs games on an old win2k laptop, and now I can get rid of it. Script is working great for me so far, as I'm in the land of no baseball coverage called New Zealand. Anyhow, just wanted to listen to the Cubs audio mostly, and one thing I'm wondering that I haven't figured out, yet, is getting the away team's audio. Anyhow armed with firebug and I think there is another python script that gets you the gameid, shouldn't be to hard to grab that stream now and stuff it in mplayer or vlc. Anyhow, just wanted to say thanks to whoever created this, and anyone having trouble, it works fine for me on Ubuntu 'hardy'.

daftcat · 08-10-2008, 02:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by floydwilde

I'd been hoping a nice utility like this would get written. I just found today when doing a google search on 'mlb.com linux'. Had been listening to my Cubs games on an old win2k laptop, and now I can get rid of it. Script is working great for me so far, as I'm in the land of no baseball coverage called New Zealand. Anyhow, just wanted to listen to the Cubs audio mostly, and one thing I'm wondering that I haven't figured out, yet, is getting the away team's audio. Anyhow armed with firebug and I think there is another python script that gets you the gameid, shouldn't be to hard to grab that stream now and stuff it in mplayer or vlc. Anyhow, just wanted to say thanks to whoever created this, and anyone having trouble, it works fine for me on Ubuntu 'hardy'.

Don't give up on mlbviewer yet. There's a feature called audio following that I think will do exactly what you are looking for. If you put the following in your config file (~/.mlb/config):

Code:

audio_follow=chc

Whenever you listen to a Cubs game, whether they are the home team or the away team, it will select the Cubs broadcast for audio.

More information from the README file:

Code:

audio_follow = x (team whose local radio broadcasters you always want
to listen to)

Note that blackout and audio_follow use the following team codes:
     'ana', 'ari', 'atl', 'bal', 'bos', 'chc', 'cin', 'cle', 'col',
     'cws', 'det', 'fla', 'hou', 'kc', 'la', 'mil', 'min', 'nym',
     'nyy', 'oak', 'phi', 'pit', 'sd', 'sea', 'sf', 'stl', 'tb',
     'tex', 'tor', 'was'

floydwilde · 08-10-2008, 04:25 AM

yep, finally got around to reading the README today, and saw that, thanks for the descriptive reply. It was actually when I did this:

Code:

#:~/Software/mlbviewer$ grep away mlbviewer.py 
                    away = available[n][0]['away']
                    #s = ' '.join(TEAMCODES[away][1:]).strip() + ' at ' +\
                        ' '.join(TEAMCODES[away][1:]).strip() + ' at ' +\
                if home in cfg['favorite'] or away in cfg['favorite']:

I figured out that feature was there

fang2415 · 08-13-2008, 03:18 PM

Hmm, I seem to be having some trouble with svn version 99, but only on one of my machines. Don't think I've seen any other reports of this so far -- here's the error message:

Code:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./mlbviewer.py", line 10, in <module>
    from MLBviewer import TEAMCODES
ImportError: cannot import name TEAMCODES

Any ideas?

daftcat · 08-13-2008, 11:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fang2415

Hmm, I seem to be having some trouble with svn version 99, but only on one of my machines. Don't think I've seen any other reports of this so far -- here's the error message:

Code:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./mlbviewer.py", line 10, in <module>
    from MLBviewer import TEAMCODES
ImportError: cannot import name TEAMCODES

Any ideas?

Have you by any chance run the setup.py previously, but not yet with svn 99?

This is a small change I made several svn's ago to support favorite team highlighting. If you have run the setup previously, your svn version is likely looking in the installed files rather than the svn files. Run the setup again with the svn version. Your other machine likely doesn't have the issue if this is a fresh install.

EDIT: The small change I'm referring to is exporting the TEAMCODES in the library so they can be imported from the GUI. If you have a library installed globally, and you're evaluating a GUI locally, you're not going to have the exported TEAMCODES. You'll now need to globally install (setup.py) every version you want to evaluate if you've globally installed even once. That is, unless the updated list of files from svn contains library files from MLBviewer. If it only contains mlbviewer.py, you can probably test those changes locally.

fang2415 · 08-15-2008, 04:14 AM

I don't think I've ever installed globally (and I think I'd kinda prefer not to). I guess I might have tested it a while ago and forgot though. Is there a way to check, or to remove the global install?

I could also get rid of the /home/user/mlbviewer folder and try a fresh (local) install from the svn (I'm at work now, but can try it when I get home). If that doesn't work, is there a particular place I should look for that library? Or any other info that would help?

If not, and if there aren't any other options, I will give the global install a try and see if that works.

cnystrom · 08-16-2008, 12:47 AM

Has anyone gotten mlbviewer to work through a firewall, say if you wanted to watch while at work?

Thanks in advance,
Chris

daftcat · 08-18-2008, 11:50 PM

I'm on vacation until the 29th. So far, my trip has been great. I saw a game at Fenway even though the Red Sox got slaughtered by the Blue Jays. Better luck when I see them in Yankee Stadium next week.

My first hotel has terrible Internet connectivity. It takes minutes to load the pages if they load at all. I probably won't answer messages posted here until the weekend when I switch hotels.

Anyway, I don't have TV at home so it's a real treat to be watching the Olympics. This has been something I've been looking forward to as part of my vacation.

daftcat · 08-18-2008, 11:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fang2415

I don't think I've ever installed globally (and I think I'd kinda prefer not to). I guess I might have tested it a while ago and forgot though. Is there a way to check, or to remove the global install?

I could also get rid of the /home/user/mlbviewer folder and try a fresh (local) install from the svn (I'm at work now, but can try it when I get home). If that doesn't work, is there a particular place I should look for that library? Or any other info that would help?

If not, and if there aren't any other options, I will give the global install a try and see if that works.

Looks like I found a rare moment of decent connectivity so I might as well us it.

Try /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/mlbviewer. If this directory exists, try renaming it to something like mlbviewer-dontuse or move this directory out of your site-packages directory, or simply remove it if you don't want global install at all.

daftcat · 08-18-2008, 11:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cnystrom

Has anyone gotten mlbviewer to work through a firewall, say if you wanted to watch while at work?

Thanks in advance,
Chris

Yeah, I use it at work sometimes. I'll use the 400K stream at work just to be nice to the network since it's shared with the rest of the office. Is there a specific problem you are running into or are you asking before you try it yourself?

fang2415 · 08-20-2008, 04:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fang2415

I could also get rid of the /home/user/mlbviewer folder and try a fresh (local) install from the svn

This seems to have worked, so no need to hunt down any global libraries (I was right that I never did a global install). No idea why it broke in the first place -- corrupted file in my home directory maybe? Anyway, thanks for the tip daftcat, if anybody else has that problem it'll give them extra stuff to try.

Glad you're able to catch both baseball and the Olympics. My cable package seems to have left me cold in the balkanized world of British interactive TV, so I don't get much except the track & field (i.e., "athletics") and newly UK-dominated sitting-down sports (cycling, sailing, and rowing) that BBC1 shows all the time. If only there was an mlbviewer for Olympic water polo, then I'd really be all set.

itshardertotell · 08-20-2008, 01:08 PM

hi folks,

i just recently changed my os from windows xp to linux ubuntu and was desperately looking for a program to be able to still watch mlb.tv games with... and had almost given up on it until i found mlbviewer and a good and detailed description for a newbie like me! i think it really looks and works great for me and deserves all the praise i can come up with! thanks so much for developing this, for keeping it running so that a lonely baseball nerd from germany can watch his mlb-games as often as possible!

cheers,
markus

AdamWill · 08-21-2008, 12:22 AM

First of all, just wanted to say a personal thanks for this great tool! I used to do this all manually, very excruciatingly, but this sure makes it a hell of a lot easier

Secondly, I packaged mlbviewer for Mandriva; Mandriva users will be able to find it in /contrib/release for Cooker and /contrib/backports for 2008 and 2008 Spring shortly. FWIW, I found that at least on Cooker, ffmpeg is capable of decoding the stream very well, I didn't have to rely on win32-codecs.

Thanks again to everyone involved in coming up with this tool! Having the 1.2Mb stream would be great, but I can live without for sure

cnystrom · 08-21-2008, 06:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by daftcat

Yeah, I use it at work sometimes. I'll use the 400K stream at work just to be nice to the network since it's shared with the rest of the office. Is there a specific problem you are running into or are you asking before you try it yourself?

It just does not connect. I believe the problem is the firewall. Are you behind a firewall? Is there someplace to set a proxy or something?

daftcat · 08-22-2008, 01:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cnystrom

It just does not connect. I believe the problem is the firewall. Are you behind a firewall? Is there someplace to set a proxy or something?

When you say it doesn't connect, where does it fail? Does it retrieve the listings? Does it authenticate and retrieve a media url? Is mplayer failing to connect to the media stream? Is mplayer installed?

If you can browse the web, I wouldn't expect it to fail until it launches mplayer. If it's mplayer that's not connecting, then you need to find out if mplayer supports proxies and how to configure that in either your mplayer configuration file (I'm away from my home pc so I can't tell you which file that is) or the command-line via the video_player line in your $HOME/.mlb/config. If it's failing on the listings, I would try updating or reinstalling your python. Use 2.5 or later.