oh i kinda misspoke. i wasn't saying the win/mac flash versions weren't good. i was commenting on how bad mlb's flash viewer is. i for one certainly hope that the VDPAU gets supported so I can enjoy mlb.tv on all my machines. as it is right now, this is really the only way to get smooth fullscreen without stuttering or crashing (and i have powerful boxes with fast connections). but as we're discovering, mlbviewer is the only way to get mlb.tv on the popcorn hour. huge plus.

According to this page:

http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinesto...info&item_id=6

The popcorn hour device should be able to play AAC audio. Maybe it's a firmware thing?

i dunno if it's my popcorn hour itself, but last time i upgraded firmware i had some troubles. i'm a little hesitant to do it again just because it's working with the earlier firmware. it definately supports aac becuase there's an option in the settings regarding how to handle it (passthrough or reencode) but no dice with the mlb stream. i think that mencoder will do the trick though but i can't even get a stream to load right now because i think nextdef is down.

According to this NexDef FAQ, it sounds like NexDef is "useful for everyone." Still waiting to hear on results from my non-premium members though.

I wonder if mlb would let me subscribe my cat to a non-premium account for a month....

Do you think it's the FLV container? Maybe you should record a 5 minute sample and send it off to Popcorn Hour vendor for testing. That's what we did for mplayer/ffmpeg and got a fix in a startlingly short amount of time.

i will see about sending a sample to them, i think they would help me out.

in any case I'm watching with the mencoder command that theophile gave earlier. it is only slightly out of sync (less than a second) but other than that, it's perfect. i'd bet there is a way to get mencoder to keep it in sync. it doesn't seem to be getting worse, it just needs some type of delay setting i think

I'm reading the MLB.com support forum for issues with NexDef and I have to say...

I am SOOOO grateful that my users are nothing like the ungrateful a-holes that post on those forums every minute of every day. It seems if even one person shows the tiniest amount of respect, appreciation, or "it works for me", they get lynched by the rest of them and called MLB.com spies.

I have the utmost respect for the mlbsupport admin (or group of admins) who continues to provide level-headed (although perhaps not the most helpful) responses day in and day out.

If I had to support a bunch of jerks like that, I would have given this project up for dust months ago.

The level of support and appreciation I get from you guys keeps me going. Thanks!

Yeah, I remember visiting there last year or the year before. It was a bloodbath. I think they're all Yankees fans. ;-)

Wow! I had a really tenacious dumpstream. 1.5 GB of 800K stream. Rough calculations tell me that 300 Mb of that is probably the post-game MLB.TV Premium ad feed. I'm at work now, so I can't verify that. I might have to add end_time to the nexdef url.

Two minor additions/fixes went into this revision.

1. If a %f is present in your video_player command, mlbviewer.py will expand that %f to game-id-call-letters.mp4 e.g. 2009-04-19-clemlb-nyymlb-YES.mp4. This is a convenience feature for you guys hacking in recording/transcoding support (which won't be officially supported if nexdef pans out for non-premium users.) This drops the file to the current working directory. I might change this to mlbdvr_games directory, if and when I add gameday audio back in. I might also fork off gameday audio to keep that nasty record code out of mlbviewer. It would be nice to have a single interface, but it will be nicer to have manageable code.

2. Coverage selection (video_follow) had a flaw in its algorithm.

It used to be:

1. If coverage_association = 0, select it (national games have coverage association of 0 and don't have home and away coverage, so if it's national, it's all your going to get)

2. If preferred coverage is in content list (if video_follow team is in the list of coverage associations), select it.

3. If 1. and 2. weren't met, raise an error displaying the available coverage. This would be "okay" if you could change your stream selection. However, video_follow overrides any stream selection choice. So, if your followed team doesn't have coverage, you're screwed. This happened to me with yesterday's KC game. Only the Texas coverage was available.

So, in this revision, if it's not national, and preferred isn't found, then try to select whatever is available. If that fails, you'll see the content list (which would presumably be empty.)

i ask that you consider the customer's frustration with mlbsupport's refusal to admit any problem on their end.

I believe that:

1) mlbsupport is a team of lower-paid employees (or more likely interns) who have scripted responses
2) mlbsupport is explicitly told not to guess or admit any problems unless they are told by their superiors/engineering department that, "yes, indeed there is a problem with this and this can be shared on the forums"

mlbsupport is basically the shit job at MLBAM and is probably the same folks who answer the phones. They probably have an internal database or bulletin board of known problems, suggested workarounds, and canned responses and strict instructions not to deviate from any of this. It's like any tech support job really. The more information you admit you know, the more work and more dialogue you are inviting from the customers. You catch less shit with your mouth closed.

Like any development house, you put your peons on the phones to keep your bright minds relatively unmolested so they can fix those problems they probably already know about.

I can tell you two weeks into the season, and I have noticed the improvements and bug fixes. It's still far from perfect but it's a whole lot better than it was on Opening Week. Those kinds of improvements can't happen if the developers are constantly having to tell mlbsupport what to say on the forums. I expect the service will continue to improve as the season goes on regardless of whether we hold mlbsupport's ass to the fire for a mea culpa or an apology.

I've also personally received two helpful responses on the forums. Well, one of them was from mlbsupport. Another was from MLBAM directly who had received my request through mlbsupport.* So I think if you don't expect the world from them, mlbsupport does do a fairly good job for the scope of what that job is.



*The fact that we have a download link on mlb.com for the nexdef jars instead of having to unravel the Mac OS X dmg is a direct result of asking for such a link on the support forums.

daftcat, have you looked at boxee?
i've been working on a mlb.tv plugin for boxee and looks like mlbviewer and the latest changes may be a great fit.

linuxphan,

That's great news! I have been trying to recruit a developer to write an MLB-TV plugin for XBMC. Since Boxee is based on XBMC, it would be great if you could work on your Boxee plugin with an eye toward XBMC compatibility.

Since mlbviewer is already written in python and since it has a library, my understanding is that it would be relatively trivial to write a Boxee/XBMC plugin. The only problem at the moment is making sure the Boxee/XBMC build has the most recent version of h264.c from ffmpeg. Otherwise, the video will not work.

I haven't looked at boxee, and frankly, I'm not really interested in taking on another project.

HOWEVER, I'll gladly support you in your efforts if you wanted to use any MLBviewer code (the library, where mlbviewer.py is the "gui") in your plugin. I'd also be happy to link to you on the mlbviewer project page.

You can contact me directly at straycat000(at)yahoo(dot)com with any questions on how mlbviewer or mlb.tv works (as much as I know or have figured out.)