Now that I can finally play with this I have to say I LOVE it! It gives me yet another reason to fire up mlbviewer every day to catch up on what happened to my beloved Dodgers the day/night before. It took me a couple of tries to get the option coded in the configs correctly for Google Chrome but once I pulled my head out of my arse it was a bit of madeleine. I'll wish there were a way to go straight to my Dodgers feed ("la" instead of the usual "lad"? Okay.) but that's more about me being lazy than anything else. I seem to be getting a bit of traffic with people hitting my mlbviewer article so I'll have to write a followup to let folks know the shiny new bits that we have that they may not have noticed yet.

I have to look further into this. I threw the feature together in a couple of hours really late one night when I couldn't sleep. Actually, that's how you got most of the new features this season.

If favorite= can share the same codes as RSS, I could default to favorite= or "mlb" if favorite= is not defined. But if they are using different codes, e.g. lad vs. la, then I have to find a different way to do it.

EDIT: Tested with favorite team highlighting which doesn't work with "lad". Not sure where you are using "lad". The code is "la" because the only other "LA" team is "ana".

EDIT 2: Seems like if I highlight a "favorite" team in listings, I should also highlight that team in scoreboard and standings. I'll look into that too. I often don't use the color settings anymore so I'm not sure if underline (default highlighting if use_color= is not set) is going to look alright in those views.

Hmm. I guess the codes changed this year because I've used lad in the past, or at least I think I have. I have lad in my.mlb/config, which I now need to change. Of course I may just be used to using LAD ID the team when I save files (games notes, recaps, box scores, etc.).

Hi, I'm a relative Ubuntu newbie, so please bear with me. First off, I love mlbviewer, so thanks for everyone's hard work in creating it. I searched the thread for the answer, but I didn't find anything.

I currently have my config files set as so:

When I select a game to watch, this comes up in the terminal:

However, the video still pops up and works wonderfully. The only thing I can see is that the application running the video is mplayer2, as I installed it following BostonPeng's directions on their blog. So changing my config to

I get the following in the terminal and no picture at all:

I'm not terribly concerned because, as I mentioned, with the first settings it still works. Is this perhaps a video card problem?

Thanks so much, both for your program and help.

Specs:
Lenovo thinkpad x120e
Ubuntu 12.04
AMD Radeon HD 6310 Graphics (Driver: VESA: WRESTLER)
AMD E-350 Processor × 2

You had it right the first time. If you installed mplayer2, it uses the same mplayer executable name. To verify you actually have mplayer2 installed, use the -version argument (which surprisingly is not supported but still prints what you want to see.)

The "mplayer: No such file or directory" error you see is related to LIRC (IR remote control) and can be ignored. Not sure why the VPDAU error is there but it also seems to be harmless. You can ignore them.

There may be ways to silence them in the mplayer configuration files (presumably the global configuration file has settings that are causing them in the first place.) But since you can get video playback, don't worry about them. I'll see what I can figure out on my own and maybe suggest some settings to add to mplayer.conf to silence them.

mlbviewer is powerful with many, many features, configuration file options, and a few (possibly undocumented) hacks for feature requests (like tying condensed game speed to speed= option.)

The README file is getting pretty big and hard to maintain.

How many of you have read the README?

Would it be more helpful to have a QUICK-START and a Documentation directory with smaller mini-HOWTO files targeting specific features or hacks?

Any other ideas on how I can tackle the documentation in a way that's easier to digest?

Bug fixes and enhancements:

• adaptive_stream hasn't been working since the rewrite; this revision should fix that
• min_bps and max_bps used to tune adaptive streaming or request nexdef stream speed now allows kbps values
• RSS now defaults to favorite= team (or MLB if no favorite is specified.) If multiple favorites are specified, RSS will aggregate all favorite teams into default view. A value of 'mlb' in the "Enter teamcode for feed:" prompt will open the league (MLB) RSS feed.

Quick review of adaptive streaming:

Adaptive streaming refers to the ability of mlbhls to adapt through a range of min_bps to max_bps streams based on whether the network is keeping up with the requested stream. The min_bps should be set to the lowest value you want to tolerate up when the network is lagging. If the network is keeping up, then mlbhls should adapt up to but not over the max_bps value.

To enable adaptive streaming from, for example, a minimum of 1200 to a maximum of 4500, you would use the following in your config:

As of this revision, you can specify the min_bps and max_bps in either bits per second or kilobits per second, e.g. min_bps=1200 is now the same as min_bps=1200000. Since the slowest stream is 128000, if you specify a value below 128000, the code will assume it's a kbps value and multiply it by 1000 to get the bps value that mlbhls is expecting.

Valid speeds for min_bps= and max_bps= are:

128
500
800
1200
1800
2400
3000
4500

(or their equivalents in bps, e.g. 128000, 500000, etc.)

If adaptive_stream=0, mlbhls will lock onto the max_bps= stream and won't perform any speed switching adaptations based on network conditions.

I have a question about substring operations for dumping a video file (I know, I know, no dumping support).

My video_player line in the config file is:

video_player=mplayer -cache 2048 -really-quiet -dumpstream %s -dumpfile %f

But what if I wanted to just name the file 2013-05-05-texmlb-houmlb-1.mp4? That means ignoring the bolded portion here:

houmlb-1-FSSW-HD.mp4

I tried redirecting to a shell script or doing inline substring work without much help. Any ideas?

Second question: Do you plan on trying to support milb.tv? I imagine it's the same back-end and the like. If you are interested, I'll buy you a subscription and help with debugging.

Thanks a ton!

Probably not going to change that since recording is one of those grey areas in the Terms of Service. You should be thankful that %s and %f expansions are actually there at all.

Help me understand why you want to drop the call letters and maybe I can come up with something for you.

I'm not really confident that any of it is the same between products. Historically, it hasn't been.

I do know the listings is not the same at all. The listings still uses JSON (yuck!) instead of XML. And so far, my attempts to tackle that JSON have resulted in some nonsensical listings with the odd repeated game starting at 3:33 AM.

I already have an MiLB subscription and honestly, I think it was too inexpensive to motivate me to fix milbviewer for 2013. We'll see if that changes as the season goes on.

If it's a question of matching the string of the filename created, you can predict what that string will be using the z=1 flag of mlbplay, e.g.

Looking at that prefer line, it's going to be the gameid selected from mlblistings.py plus that first element in the prefer tuple.

Using some shell scripting...

Obviously, that will need to be tuned a little for double headers but you can change that "grep kc" to the grep $event_id once you have decided which event_id you want.

If you store those in variables game_id and call_letters, your filename will be ${game_id}-${call_letters}.mp4.

I've not only read the README, I refer to it often as a reference for the hotkeys. A QUICK-START may be handy, and a single file with the hotkeys could be even handier than using the README, but I don't mind how it is now.

The 'h' key is probably more up-to-date than the README for hot-keys.

The help screen and key mappings are now intertwined so that I cannot add any new hot-keys without also updating the help screen. Furthermore, you can customize the key mappings and those automatically update the Help screen as well.

Woops! I better make an updated keymap file then so I can remember everything. I usually use the "h" key anyway, but I have gone to the README to try to keep from having to constantly pull up the help screen sometimes.

The README is not that out-of-date. But it may be missing Standings and RSS depending on whether I checked in recent documentation updates or not. Maybe I'll add a hidden "save to file" feature for the Help Screen.

I just called up the file and it looks like only the RSS is missing. The Standings is in the file on line 121, so it's not nearly as bad as I was afraid it was from your earlier comment. That's from the latest upload to SF, and Saturday I'll update via svn to get the latest goodies.

One thing I'm noticing, and I'm not sure if it's an issue with my system or my 'net connection or what, but the condensed game is pretty useless to me. It's hanging up so often, and so badly, that I can't even get through the first batter. Looking at last night's Nats v Dodgers game, not logged in and with a speed of 1800K selected for mplayer2, I'm noticing this in the terminal
Using debug mode I get a URL of rtmp://cp65671.edgefcs.net/ondemand/mp4:open/mlbam/2013/05/16/mlbtv_27169291_1800K.mp4