I recently got a trial subscription to MLB.tv, just to see what it was like. The answer: not good.

I'm using Kaffeine to view the games and the kaffeine-mozilla plugin to send it to an external Kaffeine window. However, when I do so, the stream only partially works: audio is perfect but video is strangely scrambled. Every few frames come through clear, but for the most part the picture is scrambled, making the video unwatchable. To get some idea what it's like, I've posted a couple frames at http://www.pommpie.com/images/scramble01.png and http://www.pommpie.com/images/scramble02.png

Video type is identified by Kaffeine as "MS Windows Media Video VC-1 (ffmpeg) 512x288(512x288)". Any sort of help to make this actually show up well would be greatly appreciated.

Updating my own post: writing it gave me the idea to search with "ffmpeg" as a parameter rather than just "Kaffeine" as I'd been doing. This led me to learn that ffmpeg's built-in VC-1 decoder is buggy and got me to download MPlayer and the win32codecs with it. Now it works absolutely gorgeously and I am a happy man.

Almost happy. I'd kinda like to know if I can make Kaffeine use the win32codecs rather than ffmpeg to decode this stream, since I like Kaffeine. So consider the question changed!