Yes, it just creates a buffer. It will only be behind the amount of time it takes you to start playback. The advantage is that if mplayer dies because of a playback error, the file keeps getting recorded anyway and you can find where you left off. It will also help you figure out whether the problem is network related or player related. If mplayer can dump the stream without dying, you know you're getting a stable data stream.

Yup! Though you can add options to the end like -really-quiet to silence the error messages and -fs to force fullscreen playback.

If you have pulled mplayer from SVN, you shouldn't have to apply any patches. It is already included. Again, there is no need to patch anything or download individual source files. mplayer-svn already has the fix, as does ffmpeg-svn.

Are you trying to playback with mplayer?

Yes. What should be my video_player line? Currently it is just mplayer.

That should work. What is the ouput of:

mplayer --version

?

MPlayer SVN-r29229-4.3.2 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team

That should be able to play these stream no problem. You are a premium subscriber using autobahn, yes?

Posting this again cause the thread added a page.

Getting this error now for some reason:

tb24@tkb24-laptop:~$ python
Python 2.6.2 (release26-maint, Apr 19 2009, 01:56:41)
[GCC 4.3.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from suds.client import Client
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/suds-0.3.5-py2.6.egg/suds/wsse.py:26: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead

Not sure why. The archives were working fine a few minutes ago. Any ideas? Looks like suds is messed up to me.

Takabru,

We'll have to wait for daftcat to shed some light on that one.

Oh yes. I have autobahn running, and even have got it running using the (poor) flash MLB.TV player.

I an currently listening to the archived Atlanta/Washington game. For the video I just get:

[h264 @ 0x883fe20]AVC: Consumed only 1 bytes instead of xxxx over and over again where xxxx is a number between 1000 and 4000

???

That error occurs even when working properly. I suspect there is another problem and those AVC errors are masking it. Can mplayer play video from other kinds of files?

Ah.

Tried to play an mp4 and got audio (!) but no video and the following messages:

libavformat file format detected.
[lavf] Video stream found, -vid 0
[lavf] Audio stream found, -aid 1
VIDEO: [mp4v] 368x208 24bpp 25.000 fps 0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
Can't open /dev/fb0: No such file or directory
[fbdev2] Can't open /dev/fb0: No such file or directory
VO: [v4l2] No such file or directory
vo_cvidix: No vidix driver name provided, probing available ones (-v option for details)!
[cyberblade] Error occurred during pci scan: Operation not permitted
[mach64] Error occurred during pci scan: Operation not permitted
[mga] Error occurred during pci scan: Operation not permitted
[mga] Error occurred during pci scan: Operation not permitted
[nvidia_vid] Error occurred during pci scan: Operation not permitted
[pm3] Error occurred during pci scan: Operation not permitted
[radeon] Error occurred during pci scan: Operation not permitted
[rage128] Error occurred during pci scan: Operation not permitted
[s3_vid] Error occurred during pci scan: Operation not permitted
[SiS] Error occurred during pci scan: Operation not permitted
[unichrome] Error occurred during pci scan: Operation not permitted
[VO_SUB_VIDIX] Couldn't find working VIDIX driver.
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffodivx] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg MPEG-4)
==========================================================================
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [faad] AAC (MPEG2/4 Advanced Audio Coding)
FAAD: compressed input bitrate missing, assuming 128kbit/s!
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400)
Selected audio codec: [faad] afm: faad (FAAD AAC (MPEG-2/MPEG-4 Audio))
==========================================================================
AO: [oss] 44100Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
VDec: vo config request - 368 x 208 (preferred colorspace: Planar YV12)
VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 0)
Movie-Aspect is 1.77:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
VO: [null] 368x208 => 368x208 Planar YV12

Try playing that file with the option: -vo xv

If that doesn't work, try: -vo x11

Both those come up with

Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.

I thought it may be my NVIDIA drivers, but I de-activated them and still not joy...

Off to bed now (I am in UK). Many thanks for your help so far. It is really, genuinely appreciated.

Okay. You will have to recompile your mplayer. None of your video outputs seem to be enabled. Make sure to look at the output of the ./configure command before running "make." It will tell you what video output drivers are enabled or disabled.

It looks like it's just a warning.

An easy way to see if the suds code is working is to enable debugging with the 'd' key. This will make the SOAP (suds) requests and display the url parsed from the reply. If it's something with http://local.swarmcast:8001/...., then the suds code is fine and you've just got an annoying warning. If it crashes out with any error (other than login/logout unsuccessful which happens occasionally), the suds is failing. (If it displays an rtmp:// url, you're using mlbdvr instead of mlbviewer.)

If you get a url, then the next step is your autobahn.jar. I find one of two things happen with autobahn errors. Sometimes the stream just needs to be primed, aka, the first request fails but a subsequent request succeeds. If they always fails, especially with an error like "read failed:", but it worked at one time, restart the autobahn.jar:

(By the way, the first command is an interview question I always use with candidates at my work if they list any kind of linux/unix experience on their resume. )

As for streaming, I personally have lousy success with -dumpstream. It does produce a dumped file, but it's not playable (it's about 1 frame per second.) I also get much better performance with -really-quiet than I do without it. Sometimes the stream won't play for more than a second unless I have -really-quiet in the video_player command.

A more detailed way to debug mlbviewer issues is to use nexdef.py in the test directory. First find the event-id of the game you want to test with. It's the number that looks something like 14-24555-2009-04-24. You can get the event-id either from mlblistings.py or by highlighting a game in mlbviewer and looking at the internal data structure with the 'z' key. Then quit out of mlbviewer and execute nexdef.py as:

replacing that with the correct event-id.

This will produce a lot of output (and by default starts mplayer in -dumpstream mode. You can change that by editing the nexdef.py file to change the DEFAULT_PLAYER line. The second part of that command copies all the output to nexdef.log. You can either post the log file to pastebin.com if you want us to look it over.