Sure -- I'd say the silence around these parts either indicates a loss of interest in baseball or a relatively stable state of affairs. I would guess it's more the second.

I would guess the second part, this tool is stable and there hasn't been a lot of change in the last week or so. Besides, I'm too busy listening to baseball to post!

1 note. The addition of an "i" option that shows interesting info about the selected game would still be appreciated here.

Thanks again,

d

Yeah, I understand that. My progress with mlbscores has stalled somewhat as I figure out the best way to glean all the useful information into something that is both easy on the eyes and code pretty (e.g. easy to maintain.) Probably by month's end I'll have something ready. I also have a work project that, while starting slowly, I anticipate will take up much of my time.

It's coming. I'd like that too.

Off the record (e.g. no promise that I'll actually get all of this done anytime soon), I'd like to have mlb scoreboard, line scores, box scores, and standings integrated. Currently, the only sources I've seen for standings are either jsp's from mlb.com or xml's from third-party sites. I'd rather use the xml but that's probably just because I'm still not familiar with the json to python conversion. I also have a wealth of information available to me via xml so it's just a matter of writing the parsers and display code. Probably by season end I'll have everything I want integrated or integrate-able into mlbviewer. Just in time for them to change things all over again for the next season.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like I want it *right now,* I just wanted to make sure you guys know that the lack of posts here has nothing to do with a lack of interest in the project or new features. Honestly though, this is already an incredibly useful piece of software, if only MLB could have designed something so nice.

I'll be checking in here from time-to-time, and also spreading the word around a little bit about the script once you've decided you're ready to release the next version. If/when you need testers, just post here, I'll be glad to do what I can.

I'm evaluating MiLB.TV (the minor league baseball equivalent of MLB.TV)

For starters, the Gameday audio is free. The video is $7/month and only a small number of games (like 4 or 5 a day) are available. The video is only 350K and the audio on these videos isn't great.

The workflow request method for video is very similar to mlb.com. The jsp schedule page that has the video does not have the audio on it. I'll have to do some more digging to find the audio jsp schedule page.

I'll try a game or two from home to see if I even care enough to modify mlbviewer. So far, I'm not impressed.

I stopped posting once everything was working. :-) I'm very appreciative of your successful efforts at getting MLBTV and Gameday Audio working on Linux. Thank you!

Before you do a release of the latest version, I'd recommend that you add the keybinding list from the help screen in mlbplayer to the README, replacing:

Watch baseball games by pressing return. Listen to hem by pressing a. Up goes up, down goes down.

with

a Play Gameday audio of highlighted game
Left/Right Navigate one day forward or back
d Toggle debug (does not change config file)
h Display version and keybindings
j Jump to a date
Up/Down Highlight games in the current view
q Quit mlbviewer
p Toggle speed (does not change config file)
r Refresh listings
t Display top plays listing for current game
Enter Play video of highlighted game


or similar. At the very least you should mention in the README that "h" shows you the help screen.

Also, it might be worth putting "press h for help" on the bottom of the main listings screen.

I can fix the README.

The bottom of the screen is getting cluttered, but I might make a pseudo H)elp menu (hint) at the top. Otherwise I'll just put 'h for Help' at the top of the README or possibly as part of the splash. I'll also add a mention to this forum in the README. Though chances are, they're going to find this via Google anyway. I'll play around with it tonight and try to get everything checked in tonight.

I'm going out of town this weekend starting tomorrow so I'll probably be scarce around here until next week.

Update your svn and review the README content.

I also added a Help hint to the titlewin. Let me know if that looks okay.

I'm not sure when I'll next get a chance to make any new revisions--maybe not until Sunday night or Monday.

everything is fine here.

I've only got a little suggestion. When one is browsing top plays and presses L to go back to the games screen, it would be better to cache the game list instead of redownloading it. Games are ended at the time top plays are availabl and there would'nt be no more changes.

Anyway, thanks for your work

That's not necessarily true. A day game's top plays might be available before a night game has started.

But there's probably not going to be a whole lot of change in the few minutes it takes to watch the top plays.

It's not a bad idea but it's also not a trivial change. I'll note it and we'll probably implement caching in a future release.

The README looks good, I imagine it'll be a help for at least a few. It looks like you should have a hard return after "use" on the 81st line though (in the MLBGAMEID TEST TOOL section, the line that starts with "by the screen" is twice as long as any other line, somewhere close to 160 characters... I assume you want to keep all the lines at 80 characters or less?).

So, do you guys consider this release-worthy?

Up front, let me apologize for not figuring this all out. I'm a linux newbie for the most part, and am trying to MLB audio to work. Is there a step by step instruction for someone who isn't sure what python is and how to make all of this stuff work? What platform it works on (I'm on Ubuntu Hardy 64bit), and what else I need to make it happen?

Thanks for the help.

Craig

I had thought about this, and wrote up a version a while back. It's not that hard -- you just need a unique name (YYYYMMDD works fine) and a directory to save caches in (.mlb/cache works fine for that). And then it's just a question of caching it as a pickle -- which is how python allows you to write its data structures persistently to disk.

I decided against including it, just because the second less of lag seemed to be offset by the user-unfriendliness of forcing more manual refreshes. Of course, I was using it when going backwards and forwards days, so it might be more useful to do it in the situation you suggested.

If people are interested, it would be simple to add it back in or (this is my mutt-user's answer to everything) make it a configurable option. I still think, though, that repolling when you change screen is as good a time to do it as any.

Almost everything you need should be on your system already. We're going to release a new version quite soon, but if you just want to get audio, you can download the old version at

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mlbviewer

If you want a newer version that might have a few bugs in it, look a few pages back for daftcat's how to on getting the development version by using "subversion." It's easy, but you'll have to install one program. If you don't feel comfortable, though, the new version will be out quite soon.

The only other thing you'll have to install is a python module called simplejson. Just type:

'sudo aptitude install simplejson'

Now, at this point, you should check out daftcat's site

http://www.eds.org/~straycat/mlblinux.php

but I'll try to walk you through the rest.

If you're using the new (development) version, it will help you configure the program. If you're using the older version, you'll have to do it yourself. It's easy though. Just open a shell and type the following:

$ mkdir .mlb
$ cd .mlb
$ nano config

Then type
user = your_username
pass = your_password

Save it and exit.

Now if you go into mlbviewer and type 'python mlbviewer.py' a list of the day's games should come up. Find the one you want and press 'a'.

If you like the program, and want to install it to the system, type 'sudo python setup.py install'.

If you like the program, keep your eyes peeled, because the new version will be out quite soon.