just wanted to post where I am with a XBMC linux plugin, see attached screenshots.

What I have working:
3000K streaming, some buffering is necessary
condensed games playback
archived games
selecting inning playback for home&away video feeds

not working due to XBMC bugs:
remote control navigation on some pages
top plays playback

TODO:
audio streams
settings via GUI (change login/password, max stream setting)
better mplayer/autobahn handling

Attached Thumbnails

     

Oh I love you. And I am available for immediate testing. ;-)

I'll also volunteer for testing, I run both XBMC and Boxee and will love you forever if I could watch baseball using either one.

Is mlbviewer compatible with python-2.6?

Yes.

Daftcat,

I pulled down mplayer revision 29311 with the above command, but I noticed that it still grabbed the latest revision of the externals (libavcodec, etc. are now at rev. 19076). Once built, it seems to be marginally more stable, but it still crashes on some speed changes, especially 3000K->2200K (as noted by bosox with the current mplayer revision).

This similarity leads me to suspect that these crashes aren't so much latest-mplayer related as they are latest-static-ffmpeg related; is there any magic svn incantation that will revert the externals back to whatever was current when the main app was at revision X? This would appear to be the only way that our mplayer-29311 builds will ever exactly match what you have been using, since yours was built a few weeks ago and included the externals' revisions that were current at that time (which, AFAICT, would mean that libavcodec and friends were back at around rev. 18852 or so).

Oh, and as for your Royals ... five and a half back isn't that bad, at this stage of the season; $DEITY willing, my Red Sox will take the Tigers down a peg or two for you over the next three days. At least you get to watch this year's Cy Young winner pitch for your team! Do you agree that the Crispy for RamRam trade was a win-win one? Ramon has been very solid for us so far, and Coco may be streaky at the plate, but he's still the best I've ever seen out in center field.

Theophile & thepedestrian & others, here's the location for the mlbtv-xbmc-plugin project:

http://code.google.com/p/mlbtv-xbmc-plugin/

Here's the thread over on the xbmc forums where we can ask the kind xbmc developers for more support:

http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=43660

i run mlbviewer under macosx leopard. i also run the mac versions of xbmc and plex. is it possible to use your plugin with either of those in macos? if not what are the future plans? i know plex has many plugins, and if this would run under that app it would be awesome!

thanks!

I don't like Crisp's arm. He's certainly no Jose Guillen in that respect. I'm not sure if he is really all that much an improvement over Gathright with the way he's been hitting lately. He started out on fire though. Now I'm longing to have Ram Ram back because our bullpen is really hurting us. True, 5.5 isn't bad right now but they've been falling more or less in lock step with an overall weak Central division. Now that the Tigers have stepped up their play, the Royals must do the same or they're going to be a much improved cellar dweller. Case in point, Tigers lost yesterday and Royals lost. Not going to gain any ground that way.

I can get all the external revisions for you tonight and I'm not sure how you can piece them together. It might be more worthwhile to do an svn log | head on what you have and find out the date corresponding to 29311 and download a nightly source (does mplayer have nightly source tarballs?) corresponding to that date.

not to be a pest, but don't forget about new users who might still be finding there way over here. correct me if i am wrong, but following the instructions in the mlbviewer package now is going to result in a very different experience than it did for me now that the newest build of mplayer has some issues. perhaps things have been fixed in the past few days -- i have no idea as i am sticking with 29311 for now (but moon is correct, the "downgrade" didn't really revert things to being as stable as they were before i upgraded to the newest svn version).

so to avoid extra support cases over here (and some potential hair-pulling as well), is there a way to include a stable version of mplayer with mlbviewer? or at a minimum if there was a way to provide instructions to get 29311 (for example), with those corresponding dependencies, in the readme/install file, that might be useful...

edit:
and on an unrelated note: would it be possible to set a key (in the same way you change streams) that would restart the feed without having to close mplayer and restart the game in mlbviewer? if that is possible that would be a great way to resync the audio/video when sync issues arise. for live games, starting again "live" would be fine, but it would be nice for archived games if it picked up where it was when the "sync" key was pressed. anyway, i don't know if that would be easy to do, but if might be something to consider for whenever you decide to update mlbviewer. also, as mlbviewer plugins start to appear, this might also be a useful feature.

I have seen increased problems with streams dropping and/or mplayer crashing...a behavior that others have mentioned here as well. I went back to an older version of mplayer (r29308) and it didn't seem to fix anything. I wasn't certain or convinced it was an mplayer issue anyway.

I decided to try setting max_bps=2200000 in my config and...drumroll please...very few crashes or drops now. I have been testing on the archived version of last night's Giants-Nats game. Before downsetting max_bps I could not get through a complete inning without a crash or drop. Since the downsetting I've watched through 3 innings without a problem. It has even adjusted up/down between 1200 and 2200 a number of times without issue.

This leads me to think this is an issue with the MLB.TV 3000K stream yet again. A couple weeks back it was great (when it finally returned). But it seems as though it is not streaming as well now. Anyone else wanna try this theory out on their end to see that it's independent of my setup/network?

I am gonna go back to the latest mplayer and test at 2200K for a bit now to see if there is any change in stability.

i have been (and am right now) watching the 3000k streams with no problem. the only issue i have is that there is a good chance of a crash if i switch from 3000k to 2200k feed. perhaps you are having mplayer issues when your system tries to go from 3000 to 2200?

as was mentioned above, downgrading mplayer does not downgrade the dependencies (or externals if that is the correct term). since the issue began for me when i upgraded to the latest mplayer, i would say that is probably the culprit. but we wait for the expert to weigh in...
;-)

Initially I had been watching at 3000K with the -fs switch so I wasn't able to actively see when the stream was switching via the status in mlbviewer. When I lowered my max_bps I also removed the -fs so I could watch the stream size change. I have seen numerous switches from 2200 to 1200 and back with no dropping of the stream.

I am having a hard time understanding what could be different in mplayer that would cause a crash when switching from 3000K to 2200K, but the very same mplayer code doesn't have any issues when switching from 2200K to 1200K.

Incidentally, my method of "downgrading" mplayer DOES downgrade the externals. When you svn up on mplayer it updates all the other linked externals as well but when you svn -r on a revision it just rolls back the mplayer code itself. So building an old mplayer via svn -r doesn't truly build downgrade everything as you say. However, each time I've built mplayer I've created a .deb package that is labelled with the svn # of mplayer. So to roll back I only needed to sudo apt-get remove mplayer then re-install using the package of my choosing...no rebuilding, no code rollbacks. I am seeing these crash problems with the older mplayer package which I think contains the older externals.

It should be possible. I have a macosx box, too, to test with. It might require compiling xbmc and mplayer just like on linux but I haven't been following macos mlbviewer issues.

so you are saying i would have to run the linux version of xbmc? i can definitely try that as currently mlbviewer and mplayer (linux version) are running quite well for me on the mac. it would be even better if i could run your plugin in the macos version of xmbc or plex (have you checked out their plugin architecture?), but perhaps that is for later down the road.

does linux xbmc use mplayer or some sort of embedded player? my only problem with mplayer on the mac is that i cannot figure out how to get the video to play fullscreen on an second display. if you have any suggestions on how to deal with this i would really appreciate it!

anyway, i guess have have some testing to do!