MLB.TV in Linux
 

I think I already know the answer, but thought I'd check to see if anyone has a work around.

During Spring Training I was able to watch streaming video and listen to streaming audio from MLBs website (it's a subscription service). Just before the regular season started, they changed their format and now I can't watch or listen.

In Windows, the video feed stopped working in Mozilla also (audio works). Video and audio work in IE. MLBs support site says they support Firefox but doesn't mention Mozilla. So I loaded Firefox on my Windows machine. I can watch the video with Firefox.

So, back to Linux. I install Firefox, but still no dice. I believe I've got all the plugins installed and working properly (it worked before they changed their format).

Like I said, I think the answer is going to be, "your screwed", but thought I'd check to see if anyone has a work around.

BTW, I'm using Fedora Core 4 and here's a brief list of the plugins I have installed:

Java(TM) Plug-in 1.5.0_06-b05
Google VLC multimedia plugin 1.0
QuickTime Plug-in 6.0
RealPlayer 9
Windows Media Player Plugin
mplayerplug-in 3.21
Shockwave Flash
Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In Compatible
Default Plugin

Thanks in advance.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyone coming across this thread for the 1st time, the first part of this thread is waaaay out of date. Two posters here, daftcat and jkr have come up with solutions for watching MLB.TV. You can skip to the last 1/2 of the thread and read all about it, or you can get their awesome mlbviewer program at sourceforge.

There's also the test version of their program.

sorry see next entry

hello I had the same problem. I love my baseball, GO PADRES!!
Anyway, You need mplayer and then do the following...

1. Install the lates wine,
2. Download and install firefox windows version
3. On firefox download the extension MediaPlayerConnectivity
https://addons.mozilla.org/extension...nfo.php?id=446
4. Go to the Macromedia site and install flash
5. Using your favorite editor, make file mplayer.exe and cut and paste this to it

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/mplayer -really-quiet -nojoystick -nofs -zoom -vo xv,x11 -ao esd,alsa,oss,arts,null -osdlevel 0 $1 </dev/null

place this file in your home directory, and make sure it is executable.

6. Configure MediaPlayerConnectivity to use mplayer.exe for your media.
7. Almost forgot. Copy npdsplay.dll, the wmp plugin into the firefox plugin folder ($HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/plugins). You can get this file from a windos machine. Don't try to install wmp with wine, it will probably fail and screw up this setup.

8. Play ball

This is great. I got most everything working so far. (this reply is in Windows version of Firefox running on Wine)

When I click a link to a game, it pops open the player window, but then i get an error.

The box is labeled "npdsplay" and the errors says "Can not create DirectShow Player"

Any Ideas? I'm so close to being free of Windows.

yes, forgot to mention that too. Just click on that. Then, mplayer will be lauched, depending how you set up mediaplayerconnectivity, either automatically or by clicking on the launch button. Sometimes mplayer will launch two instances, so just close one of them. Let me know if it works for you. GO PADRES!!

Holy Cow, It works!!!

Just for that I'm going to root for the Padres as my National League team. Go Indians!!!

Only minor problem is it's too 'squished' horizontally and I can't change the ratio. Any idea how to change it.

Thanks for all your help.

That's great. I'm actually streaming a couple of games. Not sure about the window issue, but you can use the nomal mplayer feature like full screen if you press the "f" key, Also my $HOME/.mplayer/config file has theese entries
vo=xv
ao=alsa
autosync = 0

For more info about mplayer also try
man mplayer

Let me know if you got it to work. Go Padres!!

Ok after all that work it turns out there migth be a better or easier way.
1. add noembed=1 to $HOME/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf
2. Using native firefox (linux version), go to mlb.com and at the top of the page log in. The key is to log in first.
3. Then select a game and mplayer will launch a window.

I do have a problem. So far no audio from mplayer. I'm sure its a setup issue, I'll look at it later, but it may work for you.

High CPU usage
 

This works for me too, thanks. One thing though...CPU usage is really high and the video stream is very choppy as a result. Any suggestions.

Thanks again, I thought I'd thrown away the $80 for the season and was a little peeved. If I can get this to work seamlessly I'll be pumped.

are you using -vo xv option. I running an AMD athlon 3000, nvidia fx5500, 512M ram, and I can run several windows of streaming video at once without problems. Video starts to break with more than 4 windows, and since the audio is all mixed, it all sounds like my old girl friend, CRAZY.

Using x11 instead of xv
 

I'm using -vo x11 , I'll try xv...what's the difference?

This seems to work for me

---------
Ok after all that work it turns out there migth be a better or easier way.
1. add noembed=1 to $HOME/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf
2. Using native firefox (linux version), go to mlb.com and at the top of the page log in. The key is to log in first.
3. Then select a game and mplayer will launch a window.

I do have a problem. So far no audio from mplayer. I'm sure its a setup issue, I'll look at it later, but it may work for you.
---------

watching home games... read this...
http://www.oaklandfans.com/discus/me...tml?1094264723

http://www.publicproxyservers.com/

Hello,

I would also like to get in on this action. I have followed the steps outlined above, however, everytime I launch the game, it appears to just be a macromedia window. Not really sure what I'm doing wrong. Also, I had to manually create the Mozilla/Firefox/plugin folder, is that normal? I don't know anything about wine... so not even sure if I'm running it correctly.

Helps is appreciated, thanks.

there are two methods that you can use to watch games on linux. One with wine, and the other (prefered) with linux. I summarized the steps required to make it work with the prefered method. You just need the mplayer and mplayerplu-in working with mozilla or firefox. You don't need to try it with wine. I mentioned it inititally since at the time I could not get MLB.TV to work on a native linux browser. As mentioned on one of my previous postings, the main thing is to log-in first, and then select the game.

------------------
Ok after all that work it turns out there migth be a better or easier way.
1. add noembed=1 to $HOME/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf
2. Using native firefox (linux version), go to mlb.com and at the top of the page log in. The key is to log in first.
3. Then select a game and mplayer will launch a window.
-----------------

Using Fedora Core 5, I only get audio from using the preferred method, or the wine one. My files are located in other area than the one you all have described. My .mplayer.conf file was in etc. Oh well, I still have my windows partition.

if you only have audio, then the problem migth be
1. Running mplayer x86_64. You need the 32 bit (x86,i386) version.
2. You do not have the essential codecs installed. Get the from the mplayer site. Install them in /usr/lib/win32
3. Need to specify vo=xv in mplayer.conf file
4. Make sure the $HOME/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf file has noembed=1

Using all the good info in this forum, I'm so close to getting this to work. But I'm stuck.

I installed mplayerplug-in 3.21 and made /etc/mplayerplug-in.conf and ~/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf with noembed=1. That got the mlb.tv player to pop out a separate mplayer window, as claimed. However, the window was `transparent' and non-functional. I found the following link on another forum (forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=101185):

mplayer -cache 512 mms://a1503.v108692.c10869.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1503/10869/v0001/mlb.download.akamai.com/10869/2006/open/fastcast/archive03/032406_fastcast_350.wmv?ct1=mlb

Using that directly on the command line, I got the same result.


Then I realized the mplayer itself was compiled without win32codecs! So note if you're using gentoo: mplayer MUST be emerged using the win32codecs USE flag! So I've recompiled, and the above command works, both sound and video play! However, firefox is even worse. The separate mplayer frame won't even pop out anymore. And when it was doing so before, there used to be an mplayer process started, much like the above command. No such process now. (I've since tried that command directly from my shell, but what I was trying to view requires a username and password.)

I'd appreciate some help so much. I think I've followed everything above to a tee. Here's some more info (I'm using gentoo):

firefox 1.5.0.3 (~x86 masked)

mplayer 1.0.20060415 (vo=xv,x11 ao=alsa autosync=0 all specified in both /etc/mplayer.config and ~/.mplayer/config)

win32codecs 20050216

I always log on through the mlb.tv link before opening the player; about:config shows lots and lots of media plugins, all enabled and using mplayerplug-in; /usr/lib/win32 has lots of good stuff; /opt/netscape/plugins (apparently firefox's plugin directory) has lots of mplayerplug-in .so and .xpt files; ...



P.S. At this point I think I've seen the flash video of the White Sox winning the world series a million times.

Might have a simple answer, but someone will have to confirm.
 

If you have the proper codecs installed already, get the MediaPlayer Connectivity extension from Firefox. You'll have to set it up to use the media player you prefer for WMV (for me, it's /usr/bin/kaffeine). When you click on a video at MLB.com, it will open in a new window. Maximize that window and right click on the white space at the right. From the menu, choose MediaPlayer Connectivity> List all media links for this page.

A popup should appear with the link in it. Click on that link to start the video.

This works on the free videos, but since I don't have a subscription (nor do I want one) I can't test it with paid content. Someone want to try this and see if it works?

Thanks so much for the help. That'll help me with lots of other stuff, but it won't work for watching games.

When I click on video links from mlb.com or highlight links from the mlb.tv player, MediaPlayerConnectivity works great, exactly as stated above. However, with games, when I "right-click -> MediaPlayerConnectivity -> List all media links of page", The pop-up window is blank, the cursor has a timer, and it just hangs. When I "right-click -> MediaPlayerConnectivity -> Open [...the link...]", an mplayer window pops up, but it hangs and I have to manually kill it. But I'm not surprised, since that link is http/*.jsp, and whenever things work it's mms/*.wmv.

Now, if I "right-click -> MediaPlayerConnectivity -> Click to get more media links!" It pops up the full url of that http link for a second, and there's an mms/wmv url in the query string given to the java server page. But when I try that out directly with mplayer, it exits immediately (one message says "Unknown ASF streaming type", but obviously this is not the correct way to do things, so I'm not making too much of it).

I'd greatly appreciate any more help. If I figure it out in the meantime I'll be sure to post a summary of how I got it working. I still think the mplayerplug-in noembed=1 is the way to go, it just stopped working after I re-emerged mplayer with win32codecs.

Thanks.

Using the above method, I can get it to work, using Kplayer instead of Kaffeine, but I don't think that makes much difference. In fact, it works with regular mplayer too. Strange, this didn't work a couple of days ago. If it helps anyone out, most of the multimedia applications are found in usr/bin. You can plug in the addresses, like usr/bin/kplayer, into the slots under configuration.

thanks all

I'm having a similar problem as well. I can get the highlight videos fine (they pop up in a new MPlayer window), but there's no sound with them. I also can't get the live games to stream properly either. When I right click on the white space and go to MediaPlayerConnectivity a window pops up for me to select the media I want to view but when I try to view it I get a "video player undefined for that type of media". But according to Tools > MediaPlayerConnectivity > Configure *.wmv is assigned to /usr/local/bin/mplayer which is correct as far as I know. :confused:

I'm using Firefox 1.5.0.3 on Slack 10.2 (2.4 kernel) and the latest MPlayer/mplayerplug-in I can find.

EDIT: I got the sound to work, but the video is really choppy now. :scratch:

I'm not getting that error, but like I mentioned above the link that MediaPlayerConnectivity finds for the live games seems to be a .jsp, and the wmv url is one of several parameters in the query string. Maybe it has something do with the fact that it's subscription content? But I'm already logged in.

Anyways, have you tried associating /usr/local/bin/mplayer with *.jsp?

I go to mlb.tv and log in using the link at the upper right before I try to view any of the games so I don't think that's my problem. When I click on the "List all media links of page" in the white space of the pop up window the *.jsp listing has the + next to it and when it drops down there's a *.wmv file and when I click on that one I get the same can't be displayed error.

There isn't an option in my Tools > MediaPlayerConnectivity > Configure for *.jsp files. All I have are: RealPlayer, WMV, QuickTime, Playlist, MP3/OGG/AAC, and Wave/Midi/Au/Aif; which are all associated with /usr/local/bin/mplayer. There are also entries for Flash, NullSoft Video, Shockwave, Authorware, and Divx; but they're not associated with any player. I don't see anything with *.jsp, so what noob mistake am I making now? :rolleyes::study:

I'm also not getting the new MPlayer window to pop up for the game stream like I am for the highlights if that makes any sense. I can now view the recap and game highlights perfectly (video+sound working) other than the video being pretty choppy.:scratch:

That's the type of thing I was hoping would happen, but in my case it won't even list the links; that window just hangs.

Yeah, you're right. I had remembered seeing the thing saying "define more types...", but now that I try it it still only lets you do a predefined set.

Exactly my problem ...

On the choppiness issue, the videos are just as choppy in mcwindows. At least thats been my experience.

Yeah, I booted up XP yesterday to watch a couple games and the choppiness was about the same as what I experienced on the parts I could get to work in Linux.

I still have no idea why I get the undefined media type error with the *.wmv that appears when I expand the *.jsp entry. :scratch: I can view embedded *.wmv files just fine (and most of the other major types).:scratch:

Sorry, nothing helpful to offer, but just want to say that I too am now getting an mms link, and no jsp stuff. Worth noting because I've changed absolutely nothing on my end since several days ago!!! Is mlb.tv changing things?

An example link is:

mms://a1607.l1086962985.c10869.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1607/10869/v0001/reflector:62985?auth=ca.atcpardWbXaKdebsbucpbNcGa2bYdUa7-beCOwM-8-4giumNdx-jgm6l9lWl7kll7j7k7mdjjjclcjhmikcjcmdkik2lbkglajfk9mfjhjk&aifp=v0004&ct1=mlb&media_type=wms&av_type=v ideo&event_pk=493475&product=mlb_lg

The mlb.tv technical FAQ says these links can be put in standalone players, but they're only valid for a short amount of time. If I try to open with xine (which powers kaffiene?) I get an http 401 (unauthorized) error, even though I get it in there in a matter of seconds. If I try to play it directly with mplayer, and I get same thing as when I use MediaPlayerConnectivity to open it with mplayer: I get an empty, black mplayer window. But I do get to see some messages:

Yes there's an "Unknown ASF streaming type", but there's a read error before that, and when I tried to watch a game on a windows machine, the flash player first made me enter a credit card number for some type of verification. That, combined with xine getting an http 401, makes me think the problem might have something to do with that aspect.

Also, that windows box had windows media player 9, and it wouldn't work. I got a couple frames of the video, but the colors looked like a hallucination, and then it froze. I upgraded to version 10, and things worked fine. Totally smooth, too, none of the choppiness mentioned above.

But windows is otherwise totally useless to me, and has been for a couple years, so that's not an option.

I didn't try upgrading my WMP but I'm in the same boat as you. Other than the rare occasion I feel like firing up a non-Linux game or watching some baseball, the Windows partition on my main box is getting more and more lonely I'm afraid. :cool:

Deuce,
You mentioned earlier that you tried mplayer. Do mplayer and mplayerplug-in work on other sites? (yahoo news, cnn). It seems to me that your plugin is working but mplayer was not. If you cant get mplayer to work on other sites, then obviously you should recompile again making sure you enable the win32 codecs.

Just wanted to bump this and see if anyone else has any idea what I could do to get it working because I've run out of things to try. :cry: Like I've said in the previous posts, I can view embedded media on other sites just fine but I can't get the actual game feeds to work .. it keeps saying that the MediaPlayerConnectivity isn't defined for the type of media I'm trying to view. If I can't get this to work soon I'm gonna have to boot up Windows to get my baseball fix. :(

Nothing more to say about mlb.tv, but I appreciated the help back then. I just wrote a script to print the live score in the terminal, simple and discreet. Thought somebody here might be interested.

Posted in another forum:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=556959

**bump**

Ah... spring is in the air. The crack of the bat, flashing leather... MLB.tv apparently changing things up again. :rolleyes:

Guess they have a new media player called Microsoft Silverlight. Yipee. (I also have a new computer, so don't know if last year's configuration would have still worked)

If anyone gets theirs working, please post on how you did.

Thanks.

The old media setting with flash and wmp is still available. Some of the mlb.com content requires silverlight. Novel is working on a linux version called moonlight. They don't offer a package for the time being, but you can try to compile one yourself.
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

Excellent Sandog, thanks for the info. I'll be interested to see that 'Moonlight' when it gets a little closer to ready.

I got it working with the Wine version. Not working with the native Firefox, but I don't care. As long as I can watch baseball.

To watch in Linux, you need Firefox, flash, the Firefox plugin RealMediaConnectivity, and VLC. Other than a subscription to MLB.TV, that is it.

Make sure when you run the configuration wizard for RMC it finds VLC and lists the correct path. It'll probably find some other program for the Windows Media stream (that is the stream you are concerned with) and you'll have to correct it.

After you login, click "audio and video" in the top menu, then in the drop down, click "multimedia guide". You'll see a bunch of icons relating to the various games. If they try to take you to the "new media player" you don't want that, use the old one. You'll see what I mean when you first try it.

Anyhow, after clicking on the icon representing the game you've chose, a dark screen should pop up with an icon that looks like a roll of old camera film in the middle of it. Click it.

VLC will then appear and open with the game you've chosen playing in it.

You can use VLC full screen if you want, right click gives you various options in the full screen, to get out of it,zoom, etc.

I used it all of last year and it works on everything well but the archived games.For some reason there was always around an hour of the same blather over and over again but the game would finally come up if you wanted to wait. You couldn't move the spacer ahead because it killed the stream. I have no idea why this happens; Windows doesn't have the hour of blather first. But other than that like I said, it worked like a charm.

Edit: This approach doesn't work after the changes made by MLB at the beginning of the season. For a very nice fix go to post #592 in this thread . http://tinyurl.com/5mr8uk

The url where the script can be downloaded is below.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mlbviewer

Gah. You know, I can understand MLB wanting to upgrade and be cutting edge, but do they have to keep breaking stuff.

Today's Cleveland - Atlanta game is using the new regular season format. This year (I gotta say I'm excited) they're going to have a 1.2 Meg stream. Here's what I got, let me know if anyone else has a different experience.

Up until today I could stream in native Firefox at 400K. Starting today, looks like nothing works in native Firefox. The status bar at the bottom says "Transferring data from gdx.mlb.com" , but nothing happens.

In Windows Firefox using Wine, the 400K and 800K streams both work, but not the 1.2 Meg. Any idea why? (I have plenty of bandwidth). I must say, 1.2 meg would rock.


For some extra info, I rebooted into Windows. Looks like the 1.2 Meg is available only in Silverlight. When trying to launch 1.2 Meg with the old player in Windows/ Firefox... nothing. I went ahead and installed Silverlight and the 1.2 Meg stream works. Doesn't look all that good, however. Nothing to write home to Mom about.

Consider yourself lucky because the VLC technique I wrote about yesterday no longer works. Worked for a year and was working as of Friday but when I woke up today, nothing. I can't even watch or listen in xp in a virtual machine and I also had no luck on a couple other boxes running straight windows.

I can't get anything in "SilverLight" in any environment and the toggle to use the old player is gone.

All the same problems for me when trying to watch the Sox/Dodgers at the Coliseum last night. I really hope they didn't take away the old player option for good.

I am in the same boat as well. I've just complied and installed Moonlight (the Mono-based implementation of Silverlight) and even so, I get no audio or video.

I submitted a support request to MLB.com yesterday but I doubt that will be helpful. As far as I know, the backend video source is still WMV9, no? It's just that they put layers of bloat-ware in the way.

Several years ago someone wrote an app for PocketPC called Modern Transistor Radio. It parsed the website and fed the video feed to the PPC Windows Media player. I fear we may have to come up with a similar script just to watch what we've paid for.

Well, I have not purchased MLB.TV yet. But when viewing older streams I found that native linux players can't play anything. The problem is with flash and wmode=transparent overlay issue... (doesn't work even on firefox3, Mozilla did its part to make transparencies work on the browser but adobe hasn't fixed the linux the plugin).

Using the win32 firefox 2.0.0.13 and wine, the overlay that gives you the option for the original media player is shown and things worked as last year. I could only select 400 or 800 streams as they were the only one available, but I don't think you need Siverlight to see the 1.4 stream.

I also tried with Firefox under WINE and was able to get to a screen where the embedded Windows Media Player appeared (but didn't play, different problem). I copied the URL into Linux Firefox hoping that getting past the player selection screen would help. It didn't. I still ended up with the blank blue area on the left.

I think it really is going to come down to a fixed flash plugin.

When you say "embedded Windows Media Player", your talking about the black window with a little 'piece of movie film' looking thing? If so, just click on the movie film and it will launch the mplayer window.

Opening day bay bee!!! Go Tribe: :D

I got audio working under Linux today, but it's a pain in the ass...

Install firebug if you don't have it already. Enable it on the player page and reload. In the console you will see output that looks like:

----> prePlayerLoad:
o.mUrl=<URL HERE>

(The URL will be long, and contain the game ID and your login key. I was going to post a better example, but the forum won't let me include something that looks like a URL because I'm new. It will be a web dot servicebureau dot net address.).

Copy the URL, and pass it as the first parameter to VLC (you'll have to quote it, because it contains shell meta characters).

> vlc '<URL HERE>';

You should get your audio from VLC at this point.

Now all we need is somebody to whip up a Firefox plugin to do this for us...

I got video working the same way, but only sometimes. It can't seem to give the correct address for some of them. Also cant get the 1.2mb streams to work.

Anyone else currently trying to work on this?

I also installed moonlight 0.4. Got it working, kinda, but it still doesnt work with the mlb.tv site. Sometimes it loads, and sometimes it doesnt. I havent been able to get it to play a single game yet either.

I will try the above for video shortly. In the meantime, I've come to report a very ugly but working solution for video playback in the 400k and 800k streams.

I installed Windows versions of Firefox and VLC player using WINE. Then I installed the Flash plugin and Firefox extension called MediaPlayerConnectivity. This will allow you to open embedded media objects in the VLC player.

Run VLC once before proceeding. Go to Settings --> Preferences and click the "Advanced" box in the lower right corner. Then drill down: Video --> Output Modules. Change the "Video output module" from "default" to "Windows GDI video output". This will prevent the playback from being distorted.
Then save the options and close out VLC.

Restart Firefox and configure MediaPlayerConnectivity to use VLC player for all media. Then browse to mlb.com and select the stream you want to view. Using the Windows version of Flash should get you past the player sleections cren (select original player). Wait a moment and the plugin will load and the video window will have an icon with the play logo. Click this and it will launch VLC. If all is right, your video will start playing momentarily.

You can watch it like this, or you can take the next step which I personally think is the best one. With the video playing:

* Click File --> Wizard
* Select "Stream to Network" and click next
* Select "Existing playlist item"
* From the dropdown list, select the only item (beginning with mms://) and click next
* Select "HTTP" and leave the destination box blank, click next
* Set encapsulation format to "ASF" and click next
* Leave next page blank and click next.

Now the VLC player should act as if it has stopped playing. Now open a terminal and type 'mplayer http://localhost:8080' or 'totem http://localhost:8080'

Enjoy!

I can't get firebug to install on Gentoo. Firefox gives me an error about invalid hash or some such.


On a windows laptop that I had to drag out for just this purpose, I had to disable adblock on the page, if that helps.

However, this is just ridiculous. Why not just give us the link to the stream? Why does it have to use silverlight?

Thanks for posting this. Unfortunately, when I try to get video this way, VLC always reports that is can't open the mms link :(

I was able to get audio this way, but I'm not going to pay MLB that much for audio...

Yeah, shortly after I posted this, I found that I couldn't get it to work any longer. I don't know what happened. I'll continue poking around to see if I can make it work properly.

I don't know why we can't just have a "low-tech" option. Jeez...

I did find out that MLB.com uses a separate plugin for the 1.2M feed, which uses a bittorrent-like data distribution scheme. I haven't been able to get it installed in WINE. I'm getting ready to set up a headless Windows box with a VNC server just for use as a baseball streaming box. If I can get the 1.2M stream to play through their plugin in VLC, then I can stream it to my Linux boxes, including my MythTV box and hence, my HDTV. That's what I'm aiming for.