Thanks! I'll try to have a look at this.

But I have been watching archived games with mlbhls for a while with no problems (in fact, I love it!). Is there a reason why the offset would change in the postseason?

Also, I'm now sure that one of the audio tracks from Saturday's Rays-Rangers game is from what sounds like the late innings of the Brewers-DBacks game, and the video just shows the "This game will begin shortly" screen forever. This doesn't sound like an offset problem to me, but maybe I'm not understanding properly what it does?

Anyway, I'll try to have a play later and see if it makes a difference.

Hm, so I just tried using mlbhls to sneak a peak at a live 1200K stream and it worked fine. (That's the broadcast stream, which works from the UK -- I didn't try the alternate cameras.) So that suggests to me that 1) mlbhls isn't the problem, and 2) either MLB isn't archiving the nexdef streams properly, or mlbviewer is getting mixed up about the links it's using for archived streams.

Is anybody successfully watching archived postseason nexdef streams? If so, then it could be that something's funny with my access level. If not, then I'm guessing mlbviewer is getting confused when all the multiple camera links are archived, and isn't choosing the right one.

Can anybody point me in the right direction of where to debug this sort of thing? I could post the base64 urls that mlbviewer is passing to mlbhls if that's helpful?

Are you trying to view an archive from the 'P' screen? You shouldn't need to. The 'P' screen is only for North America to watch something resembling the live broadcast. After it's archived, we all have access to the archived games through the normal listings.

Ah, sorry, missed that. I don't think the postseason=1 option is relevant to you then.

Interesting. I think I will stick with vanilla mlbviewer this postseason as my internet bandwidth does not reliably suffice for high-def. Using vanilla mlbviewer I can get 1800K on live streams and 1200K on archived which is about as much as my internet connection to North America will handle anyway, and provides a pretty good picture provided I am not using the flash plugin.

Nope, this is just hitting "enter" at the game listing page, same as in the regular season. I did try the "P" screen to see if that would work, but I get a URL not found error for all the archived games I've tried it with.

I've done some digging, and now I'm wondering if there's just plain something screwy with the archived nexdef feeds. The thing that mlbhls downloads is just plain crazy: check out the attached screenshot showing a test pattern and a TBS graphic showing Rangers 3, Rays 0 in the ALDS game 1 -- which never happened! And who's throwing at 63 mph? It's like it was a camera test during batting practice or something.

I tracked down the xml page that the base64 url came from, which only has one link on it and looks fine to me (it's attached as a text file). It looks like mlbviewer doesn't get the url for that xml page from any listing, but just pieces it together by rote? So I guess the location of the correct version of that page may have changed, but I can't see where it would have moved to, or why the old version would still look right but with a bad stream.

I also tried using autobahn.jar instead of mlbhls and I get a "Nexdef reports that requested stream is not available" error; although that was the first time I've used autobahn.jar, so I might have been doing it wrong.

The one thing I haven't tried yet is getting the nexdef stream from within the official browser/flash interface, which sounds like a PITA. And now I'm locked out so I guess I'll have to wait for that one! But if I do get it working, does anybody know a way to see what stream url the official player uses when/if it works correctly?

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Attached Files

nexdef_url_xml.txt (3.9 KB, 12 views)

Daftcat, I also haven't tried your suggestion yet since it seemed a bigger problem than an offset would cause, but it just now occurred to me: is it possible that the start would be offset by some huge amount? Like 2 hours or something? If what I'm seeing really was camera tests during BP, then that might explain it if they're just starting the stream waaaaay earlier than usual? I'll try going crazy with the offset once my account's unlocked...

Well, that still may be the problem, but changing the offset didn't fix it. Same problem with offset at 60 or 100; I tried 500 and the mlbhls output just becomes a bunch of lines of "[MLB] Start fetching video from line: 0 (9250)".

I guess I should be clear here that when I say that I see the "This game will begin shortly" screen "forever", what I mean is that I see it for at least an hour or so. Usually I only leave it for a few minutes before quitting but I think once I left it on for several hours and it just showed that until it died, except for the few minutes where it showed the crazy test pattern. Maybe I'll try that later with a different game to see if it ever changes.

But first I guess I oughta try figuring out the (sigh) official version. If that's broken then at least we'll know for sure that it's MLB's fault...

Aha. I let the 30-Sept Rays-Rangers stream run a while longer and discovered that it is indeed showing batting practice. The attached screenshot is from about 90 minutes into the stream (with the original offset of 4 minutes or so). I get two audio tracks of park sound and one of silence. Kind of neat to see the Rangers tee off on the batting coach, actually. But, uh... it isn't quite what I was looking for...

As for the official interface: ugh, now I remember why I love mlbviewer! Does anyone know if it's even possible to use nexdef with Linux via the flash interface? Is there a link on how to set it up or something? (I get pointed at a Mac installer, which won't download.) Mind you, I'd much rather debug this using autobahn.jar or otherwise with mlbviewer, if anybody can give me a hint on what I'm doing wrong there...

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Right, well, I think I've found a workaround. I tried a different game and just let the stream run a looong time until it stopped. (I think my net connection had been interrupted when I tried that before.) Turns out, the game is there with no problems -- it's just that it doesn't start until about the 4 hour point in the stream. So... good thing mlbhls downloads the stream faster than real time!

This is actually a tolerable solution for me, as long as I start my downloads early and make sure the net stays up. Of course, it's not ideal... but it seems like a proper solution would be mlbhls's territory rather than mlbviewer's? Maybe I'll try giving that dev a shout and see if he knows a trick to do a mega-offset.

But for now, this looks like moderately good news. As usual, nothing's actually screwed up on our end, and there are ways to work around MLBAM's eccentricities.

Sorry to clutter the thread, but thanks to those who responded -- I doubt I would have figured this out without your nudges in the right direction! Hope this is helpful in case somebody else runs across the same problem.

I just don't think they are archiving the nexdef streams correctly. Just watch the non-nexdef stream ('n' key toggles nexdef.) Sorry. No Ueck, but at least you can see watch the games.

Yeah, I assume they're doing something weird because of the multiple cameras or something. I actually don't mind downloading 4 hours of BP, and if I do I can always use the vanilla stream as you suggest.

Thanks again for all your work on an awesome product. MLBAM should so hire you.

Ugh, actually, they're even worse than I thought. The nexdef feed for last night's Rays-Rangers game just starts suddenly at the top of the third inning. MLBAM is really all over the place on this one -- makes me wonder what's going on with the official player?

Anyway, vanilla streams are still solid as a backup, so if this craziness continues I'll just keep using those.

The game starts at offsets around 230 (I found values between 229-234 for the 4500k Stream). Looks like the description of the -f parameter in the mlbtv-hls-nexdef README is not correct since it says this are 230*6/60 = 23 minutes.

mlbhls output becomes the "[MLB] Start fetching video from line: 0 (..." message if the offset lies behind the end of the stream (HD_ARCHIVE_OFFSET around 500).

Well, I'm coming in really, really late on this thread, and I don't have time to read the whole thing, so I don't know if this has already been mentioned but I just wanted to report that there is a free program called Boxee from the same people that produce the Boxee Box, that works great for viewing mlb.tv. I watched every Atlanta Braves game this year with it in Ubuntu. Except those that were blacked out of course.

http://www.boxee.tv/

At the bottom of the page is a "Free Download" link that will take you to a page where you can download either the 32 bit or 64 bit deb for Ubuntu. If you install the 64bit version, you may experience very high CPU usage, but this is easily corrected by disabling the web server in the settings.

Updated svn with the first bug fix of the season. I forgot that I'm still hardcoding DST times. Maybe this year I'll finally replace that code. Until then, you'll need to update to nexdef2011 svn version 313 to even get listings to work for last year. No idea what this year might throw at us.

I'll also be forking the code to mlbviewer2012 soon. nexdef2012 fork after basic is working.

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