Installed the .44 driver and all is well. Fast! No green bar either.

Thanks for the help.

This works fine - and looks great! - under Debian/unstable using the precompiled packages from debian-multimedia.org.

I assume the relevant ones are:
mplayer - 1:1.0.rc2svn20090330-0.0
ffmpeg - 4:0.5.svn20090330-0.0
libx264-67 - 1:0.svn20090327-0.1

Svn revision 118 has a very preliminary attempt at the 2009 season support. There's lots in the README and REQUIREMENTS-2009.txt file to get you going. Eventually, I'll streamline all of this into a 2009-HOWTO.

Please pay close attention to these instructions as much of this is not yet automated.

0. Backup your mlbviewer directory. The library changes will almost certainly break your current mlbviewer installation. If you installed mlbviewer globally, you might want to remove the MLBviewer directory from your site-packages. Do a Google search to figure out how to do this.

1. Review the Requirements file and make sure you have the necessary libraries.

2. Copy the MediaService.xsd and MediaService.wsdl files to $HOME/.mlb/

3. Add dvr_record_only=True to your $HOME/.mlb/config file. In this early version, all of the attention has gone into stabilizing the recorder process and making sure it gets restarted/resumed when it inevitably craps out. Maybe someone more talented than myself can look over the rtmpdump source and see why it reliably craps out at about 360 seconds (at least for me, anyway.)

4. Use mlbdvr.py ONLY. The changes have not been made to mlbviewer.py script and the changes in the MLBviewer/mlbtv.py library will probably crash mlbviewer.py.

5. The default listings page will be a hosted page that contains mostly functional archived games from MLB.com's beta tests. There are a couple on the page that are known to be broken but are kept on the page for regressing SOAP error handling. As new beta games are added by MLB.com, I will add them to this file. When MLB.com cuts over to the new listings completely, I'll remove this restriction and download pages directly from MLB.com.

See the next post for what's working and not working.

What's working:

Not much.

- Recording of select archived games

- Detecting hung downloads and restart/resume of rtmpdump

- XML parsing of the new listings

- SOAP requests

- Session-key management (maybe working?)

- Debugging: lots of output is going to $HOME/.mlb/log. The volume of output going to this file will be reduced as the stability improves. The 'd' key debug toggle also works. Any "Uncaught error" messages you encounter, please enable debug with 'd' key and try again. This should crash and produce a stack trace. Post the stack trace here.

What's not working:

Everything else!

Live games are not supported yet (need a live game beta that's not in the middle of the work day to test this and figure it out)

Gameday audio, condensed games, top plays. MLB.com doesn't support these yet for the new player. When they beta test those offerings, I'll patch up the code to support these.

Playing any games after 3/30/2009 using the old style. If you want to play these games, use mlblistings.py and test/mlbgameid.py. This method of locating the game stream url will be deprecated on or before Opening Day. By Opening Day, I'll have removed the beta listings page and we'll be reading entirely from the new listings. Sometime shortly after that I expect to have mlblistings.py and mlbgameid.py updated for the 2009 season.

Elapsed counter is inaccurate. I think it's actually updating every 10 seconds but only incrementing by 5. That player/recorder code is a mess and this will get fixed.

Playing and recording at the same time. Please don't expect this to work. In fact, all the code to restart/resume the recorder stream lies outside of the player loop so playing and recording at the same time within mlbdvr.py will frustrate you.

What may still work:

Bookmarks

I got everything to work with the newest version on Ubuntu Jaunty.

I installed python-xml (same name for ubuntu as debian) package.

There are no ubuntu packages for suds so I downloaded the rpm and used alien to convert it to a deb. One issue I ran into is that the default python version on Jaunty is 2.6 and suds installs into and is compiled for 2.5. Since I still have python 2.5 installed I just ran 'python2.5 ./mlbdrv.py'. Perhaps it would be better to just install from source. UPDATE: I installed from source and it works fine. untar, python setup.py build, sudo python setup.py install.

I also downloaded and installed rtmpdump. Again, no ubuntu package. I just downloaded, untarred it, ran make and copied it to /usr/local/bin. The first time I compiled it I forgot to comment the #define DEBUG line in log.h. Wow that's verbose. Looks like it prints 3 lines per frame. Commented that out and recompiled and it looks much better.

So everything works fine with the default mplayer and codecs on Ubuntu Jaunty. I'll check my Intrepid install later and see how well things work there.

In case it helps, the rtmp URLs for the live streams look like this:

rtmp://cp65670.live.edgefcs.net/live/mlb_s800_09@s5318?aifp=v0006&auth=<authorisation string>&ct5=01-Apr-09&ct6=<ip address>&ct7=3996337:MLB_FLASH_800K_STREAM&ct8=1&ct1=mlb&ct3=<ipid>&ct4=mlb

But I can't see how to extract the play path from that URL.

Incidentally, the new version of mlbviewer (running mlbdvr.py) seemed to work fine for me.

I put some defensive code around the playPath parsing so that at least you can get a live game url in your log and it doesn't return "Uncaught error" anymore.

But yes, I have tried several different variations on play path and can't figure this out. Replay Media Catcher was able to figure out the play path for the archived games but even RMC is stumped on this one. Wireshark wasn't much help which means I'll have to sit down and learn me some RTMP this weekend.

Svn revision 122 doesn't return "Uncaught error" on live games. Experiment with the URL from your log file to see if you can find the magic arguments.

NOTE:

Because of the --resume option in rtmpdump string, you will have to rename the output file in ~/mlbdvr_games if you want to retry a download from scratch (e.g. attempting different play paths and such.)

soapevent.py is what mlbgameid.py was for last season.

It takes four optional arguments:

event-id (find this from either the 'z' key debug in mlbdvr.py or your log file)

scenario (playback scenario in the log file, e.g. MLB_FLASH_800K_STREAM)

playpath (-y argument for rtmpdump, default is None)

session-key (uses $HOME/.mlb/sessionkey, by default)

If you don't specify any of these, defaults are chosen.

Please use this script to test play path (-y) arguments for rtmpdump to find the magic command-line for rtmpdump of live games.

I might have another piece of the puzzle. A wireshark capture showed an application override in the RTMP connect message. The application is:

live?_fcs_vhost=cp65670.live.edgefcs.net&akmfv=1.6

The next beta test with a live game, I'll try to add this to the rtmpdump command string with the -a argument.

Here are gentoo ebuild for media-video/rtmpdump (already patched) and for dev-python/suds, in case there's some gentoo fellow out there.

Working fine with revision 127.

Only thing that tripped me up was that I initially kept trying to test mlbdvr.py with one of the "broken" games.

wow! im back in the forum and i see lot of changes!!! :=0

ok, now i backup directories, save WBC Italy games and then update to 127!

let's go!

tested this afternoon

• some games from the listing shown simply don't work. Is this known?
• nyy and bos games was downloaded successfully. It only needed 1 restart because it stopped around 80%

Good Work!!!