Btw, implementing what you suggest would actually result in hardcoding. -f 48 was a hardcoded guess at the beginning of the stream...a guess that was more frequently wrong than right. Now the exact timecode of the beginning of the stream is parsed from the innings page (and failing that, I will pass it the listings time), so that the stream always begins at the correct head of the broadcast rather than an arbitrary guess.

-F is progress. Please keep up.

The first line just says remove any previous checked out code, if present.

Also the other suggestion of finding if there is an older version of mlbhls present somewhere using 'which mlbhls' is a good one. If you find a copy in /usr/local/bin, then copy the newly built version there too.

Thanks for the suggestions. I don't deny that -F is a real step forward -- it just doesn't work yet, for me anyway! The -f option is just a workaround I'm using until I figure out why. Or, possibly, update to the new Ubuntu and not have to!

I did clear out my ~/mlbhls directory entirely, as well as all the old mlbhls binaries from /usr/bin. which mlbhls shows /usr/bin/mlbhls. To clarify, mlbhls -F will download the stream just fine, but I can't get any of my players to play it.

Yeah, I get that. I just meant that allowing users to specify which mlbhls options they want would allow without you having to build the option into the mlbviewer code. E.g., right now if I want to use "mlbhls -d" to view the debug output for a stream, either I'd have to run mlbhls manually or you'd have to hard-code the mlbhls -d option into mlbviewer. Unless there's already a way for me to change the options for mlbhls/rtmpdump and I'm missing it.

Anyway, like I say, not a big deal on this one. I doubt many users want to customize the options for the downloaders, and most who do are probably happy doing so on the command line.

If mlbhls -F is downloading it, but your players aren't playing it, then I don't understand how -f is "fixing" that.

Try downloading an mplayer2 binary if you don't want to build mplayer2 from source. My experience with the mplayer2 binaries is that they are statically compiled so you download just the mplayer binary. You can rename that binary to mplayer2 if you wish and copy that to /usr/bin. Then change your video_player= line to use mplayer2.

Yeah, I don't either. I'm guessing that -F causes some metadata to be slightly less tidy, and some people's players can figure it out anyway but mine choke on it. If the Ubuntu update doesn't fix it I'll have a look at the mlbhls code and see if I can figure out why the streams differ.

I've already tried the mplayer2 from the Ubuntu 11-10 repos and it never quite worked, although I can't remember now quite what the problems were. (No sound maybe? Or maybe any seeking at all caused a hard crash?) For now I'm happier seeking through the extra few minutes of pregame I get with -f than maintaining binaries outside of apt... But as I say I'll probably upgrade the whole system in a week or two, so it's not worth me digging too deep into it for now.

If it was no sound, try again but use the '#' key in mplayer to search the additional streams. I was often finding that the default audio stream was unknown or contained nothing but there were two additional streams for video audio and radio synchronized audio. I donwloaded a small piece of the Reds-Nats game today using nexdefdl.py and I'm able to seek through it. Not flawlessly but certainly not crashing either. Try again with mplayer2 binary and let me know what the problem is.

Otherwise, you can use the mlbplay.py method I detailed above to customize your own mlbhls command-line. The options are v=<teamcode> (find these from README file), n=1 (activate nexdef), and nu=1 (just print the url, e.g. the -B input.)

For today's Reds game (implying Red's coverage),

mlbplay.py v=cin n=1 nu=1

If instead you wanted Nats coverage, use that as your v= argument:

mlbplay.py v=was n=1 nu=1

That is really odd as the stock mplayer2 for oneiric (11.10) works fine for me, out of the box.

Yeah, I'm used to that and I always check whatever audio streams there are. Like I say I can't remember whether that was the showstopper though.

Thanks for the tips on mlbplay, that is handy. Sorry to keep complaining about something I don't have time to debug properly, I'll shut up for a while unless I have some good new information.

Can somebody help me figure out what's going wrong with mlbviewer for me?

I can watch video on the website and grab audio with mlbviewer, so my account is fine. But for some reason the reply I get at about mlbtv.py:1040 has no <url> tag in it. That makes the game_url = ... line in the try block throw an exception with the error, "Stream URL not found in reply. Stream may not be available yet."

I don't know much about SOAP but I've hacked python for a while. So I can poke around if you can tell me where to look.

Many thanks to daftcat, thegryghost, and anyone else who has helped with such great products!

Tell me the SVN revision you are using:

Also tell me whether its nexdef or standard, the date, the game, and the coverage (home or away), and the speed (if not nexdef.)

This will at least give me a starting point as there can be any number of reasons why a stream url would not be returned.

Also, if you have a ~/.mlb/unsuccessful.xml file, please post the contents to http://www.pastebin.com and post the resulting URL here. Please do not post the contents directly to here as it is a lot easier to read on pastebin than here.

I am using revision 366. I get the same problem with nexdef or on any non-nexdef speed, though audio has no problem. It's the same thing with almost every game I've tried, and it doesn't produce an unsuccessful.xml file. But I made mlbtv.py dump out the xml in 'reply' right before it tries to get game_url, and it looks like there's an authorization problem. For example, this is from the 2012-04-08-bos-det away 500K stream. (Sorry for not using pastebin, but this seemed like a short enough snippet.)

...</media-item>
<url/>
<auth-status>
<notAuthorizedStatus/>
</auth-status>...

Does that mean there is a problem with the login? Oddly, the 2012-04-13-bos-tba away 500K stream played just fine, and gave me a <successStatus/> inside the auth-status tags on the same mlbviewer session. I'm very puzzled.

So you say the same credentials work just fine through the web interface for all the services you have paid for? Are you a Premium subscriber? Standard? or just GD Audio?

Since you're comfortable enough hacking the source, look for the ERRORLOG dumping of the reply if statuscode != 1 (or success.) Clone that code to dump the ERRORLOG when your condition occurs (no game_url found in reply.) Then please post the entire reply (not just the auth-status snippet) to pastebin. I'm specifically looking to see if the request is for some alternate media or some blackout code. We had a stubborn bug a year or two ago where San Diego and Yankees both have additional subscription packages (Yankees On Yes! and ??? for SD) that was causing Yankees and Padres games to come back with no url because mlbviewer was requesting the wrong media. There may also be other snippets within the response that mean something to me that you could be overlooking.

Another option is to find the event-id from the 'z' screen and use one of the scripts in the test directory to get more debug output. I can always add more debugging to those scripts as necessary to narrow down your problem without the complexity of the mlbviewer code. The test tools are documented in one of the README files.

I'm on a business trip this week so I may not be as responsive or have the code in front of me. I should at least be able to review logs posted to pastebin and give you some hacking guidance until I return home from this trip. When I return home from the business trip, I will clean up the scripts in the test directory to remove prior years' algorithms commented out and make it easier for someone like you to follow along and add to as needed.

Do you have trouble with all stream speeds or just the 500K?

Has anyone had any trouble seeking using mplayer2 on mlbhls files? I can usually seek a couple times at the beginning and then get random length seeks, usually past the end of the stream.

I also am trying vlc, but vlc shows no video or audio.. perhaps my player command is wrong. Any examples or suggestions would be great, I'm on ubuntu 12.04 using a compiled vlc or the repo version.

No problem, work is heating up for me a little, too. I'll have more time for looking at the test scripts after next week.

Yes, the same credentials work fine on the web interface. I have a standard subscription (video, but not premium).

Okay, I copied the ERRORLOG dump to the point where it fails to find a url in the xml. I put the reply from 2012-04-08 bos-det away nexdef 300k up at http://pastebin.com/ap2ZJBVf . I have been able to grab the 04-13, 04-14, and 04-15 redsox games, but not dates before. Something seems to have changed on the mlb end, but I have no idea what it could be. At least it looks like I (and anyone with my problem) will likely get the rest of the season.