Uh-ho, I spoke too soon. All the archived games past 7pm last night won't play. I get:

An error occurred in locating the game stream:
Requested stream is not available.
Requested coverage association: 146
Available content list = []

Is this a blackout thing? Shouldn't be, as I'm in the UK and not subject to blackouts. The game will start with the Flash player.

I do notice that the game come up with their start times in UK time (i.e. Eastern US Time + 5 hours). Would that be a problem?

Looks like I still have a problem in the stream selection code. Can you pick one of those games and run it through soapevent.py and post the log to pastebin.com?

Step 1.
Find the event-id of the game you want to test. There are two ways to do this.

or

Highlight the game in mlbviewer and find the event-id in the 'z' screen.

Step 2.
Call the soapevent.py script with the event-id:

Step 3.
Copy and paste the contents of mlb.log to pastebin.com.

Step 4.
Send me the pastebin.com link.

I can already reproduce this but I'm interested in seeing which content-id's are available to you in your replies.

Anyone having issues getting the stream to work? I keep getting resource is not available when mplayer starts?

Never mind. Seems to be working again.

Hey Daftcat,

I keep having issues trying to keep a stream active for a long periods of time. It usually takes 3 or more tries loading the stream to get a stable feed. I increased the cache for mplayer to 4096 and managed to get a stable stream once. I have tried other cache sizes too with no luck (well no luck on the first 3 or 4 tries). I do have my max_bps set to 3000000 too. Any ideas?

I should add that I am able to load the streams most of the time, it is just they either close after 2 to 10 seconds.

Thanks

I think it might be a nexdef issue. Even the windows flash player stream is messed up and not being stable at all.

Nexdef is messed up atm. On my windows machine I had to turn it off and watch the regular feed. Is there a way to bypass nexdef in mlbviewer to get the lower feed? I tried lower the max_bps in config but it said it couldn't get the nexdef stream. Just curious is all if nexdef is the issue not much you can do about it.

Thanks

Looks like it was just a nexdef issue that was causing all the problems. mlbviewer is back to working quite well again.

Oh yeah, I saw you were an Expos fan. I been one for over 25 years. I still wish the Nats were back in Montreal.

Expos? No, I'm a Royals and Dodgers fan.

Not much I can do about nexdef when it's not working. You can always try restarting the autobahn.jar.

If you need to watch a game live without nexdef, it's a better idea to use the flash player. The live game support using rtmpdump (mlbdvr.py) is embarassingly bad. Even trying to watch an archived game is pretty bad. About the only saving grace of rtmpdump is that it downloads archived games very quickly. It takes about 15 minutes to download the game on my internet connection (3 mbps).

You can try rtmpdump with mlbdvr. You'll need to get rtmpdump from sourceforge and apply the patch I include with mlbviewer.

Hawk more than anything else drove me to up my subscription and I'm a Sox fan. It is Stone this year instead of DJ and he helps a bit but not enough. I mute Hawk and just watch if that is the only choice I have.

Rtmpdump works fine for me except it is so fast it eats up all of my bandwidth... wonder if there is a way to slow it down? Then I play them with mplayer and they work fine.

However, using the lastest mlbviewer I'm having audio-video sync problems. The audio is constantly a second or two ahead of the video.

What I do is start the java program, then start mlbviewer.py, start dumping the live game with mplayer and then I start watching it by playing the game with the very latest build ( today's svn ) of mplayer. But so far, I've watched maybe 3 games that way and they are all out of sync. I haven't a clue what to do to fix it.

I just stream directly and it seems fine. EDIT: until it dropped out on me in the 8th. Doh! It will be nice when I have the jump to innings interface worked out.

I've had very poor performance of rtmpdump, either playing a file recording in progress or playing a dumped live file. Playing a dumped archive file usually works though. What's your machine specs? I have a suspicion that for playing and recording at the same time, you need a bit more juice than my 1.5/1.5 laptop and definitely can't do it on the 750/256.

Apparently as reported above, I still have issues to work out in stream selection and video_follow. I have to say, though, it's nice to be able to follow my favorite broadcast teams. I'm watching Vin Scully doing the Dodgers-Colorado game right now. But it's been really nice to be able to listen to Frank White all season long. It's when the Royals played the Sox and they play them often, that I would skip the game rather than having to listen to Hawk and DJ. Seattle is another broadcast team I couldn't stand.

Have you looked into OpenJDK, and more specifically "IcedTea"? I run OpenJDK on Opensuse and it runs the nexdef jar just fine, so if you can get that on your powerpc, maybe that will work.

The reason I dump it first and then play it is I don't know how to do it without dumping it. How do you play the stream without dumping it first?

Yes, my hardware is ancient. 1.3/500. Would that be what is causing the sync problem?

Once again it is Hawk and the Stoner this year. Not Hawk and DJ. ;-)

I remember Stone when he was a pitcher for the Orioles. Okay, not really. But I remember having his baseball cards. :-)

If you're nexdef'ing, just change the video_player in your config to something like:

The autosync seems to help with sync issues.

My 750/256 can do the 800K stream through nexdef with few issues (except that lately mlb has been serving me the 600K stream.) It sometimes checks out before the end of the game (must be a Dodger fan trying to beat the traffic. ;-) ) but that may be a symptom of its age more than anything. I'm looking at buying the RAM upgrade to 512mb but damn! old memory is much more expensive than new memory. :(

I couldn't tell you which was the bigger homer of Hawk or DJ but they both lacked class and they were both annoying. I think I'd rather listen to John Mayer call a game.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll certainly give it a whirl. I had to watch yesterday's Phillies v Marlins game on my web-book hooked to my HDTV. It was painful - best I could get out of the flash player was two bars.

Just wondering - what is the reason why streaming with mplayer via mlbviewer the feed looks wonderful, yet via the Flash Player (on Ubuntu or Windows) it's largely awful?

There are more knowledgable than me on such matters but since I'm up late, I'll pull an educated guess out of my butt. :)

From what I've read here in this mammoth thread, the Flash plugin for Linux does not use the video hardware directly (e.g. like Windows without Direct-X.) This is largely just an immaturity in the Flash plugin development for Linux. Mplayer, by contrast, can and usually does use the hardware directly (I believe this is what the Xv video output driver is.) I really have no idea why mplayer kills vs. Windows Flash plugin though. The only thing I can venture is that Windows easily gets bogged down by all kinds of crap that can affect performance.

I actually performed a fresh install of Windows XP in VirtualBox tonight because there's really just ONE application that keeps me rebooting back to the Windows partition: Microsoft Money (I love love love the automatic updates with my credit union, credit card, and investment accounts which gnucash still doesn't do--manual ofx downloads and imports are not the same--and the one can't live without feature: cash flow forecast.) I'm always impressed at how quickly a new install can boot while extremely disappointed compared to how quickly this machine will slow down. I'm determined to keep this virtual machine nearly virgin so that it's still quicker and more convenient to boot it for MS Money than to boot into the native Windows partition.

Anyway, back to topic, my recommendation for you is to find a cheap laptop on ebay to use for MLB.TV if you can't get the PS3 working. You can get a Thinkpad T40 for about $200 and a 1 GB memory upgrade for another $50. There is currently a deal for a 1.3 Ghz with 1.5 Gb RAM for $200 BIN price (hate laptop auctions!) That's likely all the performance you would need to run the 2200K stream (which, for me, is indistinguishable from the 3000K stream.) For reference, my higher end test machine is a Thinkpad X41 Tablet which has all kinds of slower hardware technology to save on power consumption but it clocks in at 1.5 Ghz and 1.5 Gb RAM and handles the 2200K stream quite nicely. Since I have unreleased mlbviewer code that tells me exactly which stream I'm using, I've noticed that even with the max_bps=3000000 set, I only ever get the 2200K stream.

SVN revision delayed
 

I said there was going to be an SVN revision available on Monday but I haven't completed it and I've still got way too much to work on for my day job tonight before I can go to sleep.

Wednesday morning is likely when I'll have this revision ready for testing, meaning the Sourceforge release would probably get pushed back a week.

Here's a brief rundown of what will likely be in it.

MOST LIKELY

+ National blackout detected in the listings view rather than the SOAP requests meaning those who aren't affected by NB can "click" on through while those who are, can take note and not waste their time with a "Blackout" error message.

+ Real-time stream status: you'll know after the stream starts exactly what stream you are getting

+ Near real-time gameday audio support: rtmpdump will start download and your "audio_player=" setting will start about 30 seconds behind rtmpdump. Rtmpdump will be polled and restarted if necessary to assure you a smooth stream performance.

+ Experimental rtmpdump video support: same as gameday audio support and same as mlbdvr except, at least for me, it's so embarassingly bad that I may just rip it out and make you non-premium users a downloader script separate from mlbviewer.

+ Condensed Games

NOT LIKELY (but highly desirable)

(I want these in the Sourceforge release, though)

+ Jump to Innings interface (nexdef users only)

+ Feed selection - not HOME/AWAY/video_follow but actually let you cycle through all the available feeds and display the call letters in the status bar

+ Stream selection - same as feed selection allowing you to set your max_bps setting on the fly

+ Real-time stream selection - not even sure if this will be possible with mplayer but allow you to switch your speed while the stream is playing

EVENTUALLY (but likely not for Sourceforge release)

+ Real-time highlights (nexdef users only) details still to be worked out but it would be "no spoilers" or turned off by default

I figured out where this was coming from and checked in a fix.

I was checking for media state in MEDIA_ON and MEDIA_ARCHIVE. Swarmcast (nexdef) streams are sometimes marked as MEDIA_DONE which I wasn't checking for. Hence, I'd find no "playable" content and return an empty content list. I've added MEDIA_DONE to this list and it's checked into SVN.

Do an 'svn up' in your mlbviewer directory to get the fix.