MLB.TV in Linux

Thanks for your detailed response. Technically, I could watch it on Windows via Virtualbox on my desktop computer, but I prefer a linux native solution (thanks for your hard work in providing that). I will have to see how it looks on the living room TV and see if I can watch an occasional game in there when the wife will allow it.

I noticed a few times you had posted that you would like to stay under the radar with this. I was thinking that if this works well in Knoppmyth that I might want to post some information on their community website. Would you prefer if I didn't?

There is a chance, that next-def will work under linux.
To quote from a developer of swarmcast:
"Linux users can, however, enjoy Autobahn enabled video by pulling down the Mac installer disk image, extracting the autobahn.jar file, and invoking it with "java -jar autobahn.jar" on a Sun Java VM 1.4.1 or newer.

Additionally, we have no control over the website detection and installation experiences developed by our customers on their websties, so it may be necessary to spoof your User-Agent header or employ other trickery to work with specific sites.

Specifically in the case of MLB we do suspect it will work, though MLB will not be officially supporting it and may be entirely unaware of the fact."

This works like a charm with the swarmcast test site, however I havn't had any success with mlb.com so far. However they are still in early beta stage, so I'm still fairly hopeful.

Btw, I just like to thank you for your great work with mlbviewer. That program is awesome.

martin

Originally Posted by knappster Thanks for your detailed response. Technically, I could watch it on Windows via Virtualbox on my desktop computer, but I prefer a linux native solution (thanks for your hard work in providing that). I will have to see how it looks on the living room TV and see if I can watch an occasional game in there when the wife will allow it. I noticed a few times you had posted that you would like to stay under the radar with this. I was thinking that if this works well in Knoppmyth that I might want to post some information on their community website. Would you prefer if I didn't?

You can test 600K quality on the archives of the WBC. You might be able to test 800K on the archives of last season. I have no idea if you have to be a premium subscriber for this season to access the premium streams from last season. One other way to decide whether premium is the way to go is to buy a game off iTunes. I think they're sold for something like $1.99 a game. That's very reasonable to determine if you want to spend an extra $30 for the premium package.

I'm becoming less paranoid about mlbviewer since the mlb-support admin pointed to our thread at least once on the official support forums.

I would still like to keep hush hush on the mlbdvr.py script though. Consider it a treat to the loyal svn users who, I'm sure quite a few of them, already hacked in recording support in previous versions of mlbviewer. By the way, I'll probably release a companion to mlbgameid.py that has rudimentary recording. This would enable a good many of you clever folks to write cron jobs to record based off the output of mlblistings.py.

Originally Posted by mswift42 There is a chance, that next-def will work under linux. To quote from a developer of swarmcast: "Linux users can, however, enjoy Autobahn enabled video by pulling down the Mac installer disk image, extracting the autobahn.jar file, and invoking it with "java -jar autobahn.jar" on a Sun Java VM 1.4.1 or newer. Additionally, we have no control over the website detection and installation experiences developed by our customers on their websties, so it may be necessary to spoof your User-Agent header or employ other trickery to work with specific sites. Specifically in the case of MLB we do suspect it will work, though MLB will not be officially supporting it and may be entirely unaware of the fact." This works like a charm with the swarmcast test site, however I havn't had any success with mlb.com so far. However they are still in early beta stage, so I'm still fairly hopeful. Btw, I just like to thank you for your great work with mlbviewer. That program is awesome. martin

Excellent. I'll try this in conjunction with the flash player the next chance I get (probably not until the weekend as they only do the beta tests on the live games.)

However, there is probably some magic in the flash player that negotiates with the stream provider and the nex def plugin to get speeds other than the default 800K (or 600K for the current WBC.) So, there's probably little chance that mlbviewer will support anything other than 800K but at least the option is available to those who want to use the flash player.

I wish I had known that the NHL season is nearly over or I might have attempted a go at nhlviewer since the premium package is bundling NHL Gamecenter. Is there any interest here for an NHL version of mlbviewer (nhlviewer)? I know I did an milbviewer for the minor league offering last year and it flopped. I probably had all of 4 downloads of it.

Originally Posted by mswift42 There is a chance, that next-def will work under linux. To quote from a developer of swarmcast: "Linux users can, however, enjoy Autobahn enabled video by pulling down the Mac installer disk image, extracting the autobahn.jar file, and invoking it with "java -jar autobahn.jar" on a Sun Java VM 1.4.1 or newer. Additionally, we have no control over the website detection and installation experiences developed by our customers on their websties, so it may be necessary to spoof your User-Agent header or employ other trickery to work with specific sites. Specifically in the case of MLB we do suspect it will work, though MLB will not be officially supporting it and may be entirely unaware of the fact." This works like a charm with the swarmcast test site, however I havn't had any success with mlb.com so far. However they are still in early beta stage, so I'm still fairly hopeful. Btw, I just like to thank you for your great work with mlbviewer. That program is awesome. martin

Is there any chance you can figure out how to download the nexdef for Mac OS X?

I will probably end up spoofing the User-Agent string but if there is an easier way or a direct link that can save me some hack time.

Cheers!

I'm still holding out hope that the new 2009 media player will make use of the h.264 codec for true 720p flash video. This format has skyrocketed in popularity in just the past year and the streamability and quality far, far surpass the 1.2M stream with the NexDef plugin that MLB used last year. The framerate was so low that the stream was unwatchable for me.

I would love to have Hulu-style 720p streams, especially now that I have a VDPAU-compatible setup.

Well, it was a bit of a challenge and my results are far from conclusive but I was able to achieve a higher bitrate using the flash player BUT it was not recognizing autobahn. Unfortunately, I'm out of time because the late game is not being streamed with the new player. I was also able to download the nexdef .exe and get it to install under wine but so far, nothing doing while running the mlb-nexdef-autobahn.exe application.

I'll look at it more another time.

Originally Posted by daftcat Is there any chance you can figure out how to download the nexdef for Mac OS X? I will probably end up spoofing the User-Agent string but if there is an easier way or a direct link that can save me some hack time. Cheers!

You can download it from getautobahn.com .
BTW, I used 7-zip under windows to extract the pax file.

Originally Posted by mswift42 You can download it from getautobahn.com . BTW, I used 7-zip under windows to extract the pax file.

I figured it out. I got autobahn from the link above and used HFSExplorer on Windows to extract the pax. Debian has a pax deb so I used that to extract it.

Problem #1: my linux laptop is too slow for the flash player

Problem #2: the flash player didn't seem to recognize autobahn

There's likely some voodoo in the nexdef version of autobahn that the flash player communicates with.

The mlb-nexdef-autobahn.exe installs just find under wine but I can't seem to get it to work. Admittedly, I haven't tried very hard because I hate debugging wine.

I decided to go ahead and create a new official release. If you have svn revision 115, you have 0.1alpha9 (plus the mlbdvr.py file and minus the 0.1alpha9 version string.)

Svn revision 116 upped the version string to 0.1alpha9svn to show it is based off the 0.1alpha9 official release. No other changes went into revision 116.

I'm still interested in feedback on mlbdvr.py. Has anyone tested it yet? What's your experience(s)/opinions of it?

Originally Posted by Theophile I'm still holding out hope that the new 2009 media player will make use of the h.264 codec for true 720p flash video. This format has skyrocketed in popularity in just the past year and the streamability and quality far, far surpass the 1.2M stream with the NexDef plugin that MLB used last year. The framerate was so low that the stream was unwatchable for me. I would love to have Hulu-style 720p streams, especially now that I have a VDPAU-compatible setup.

Don't hold your breath. They seem pretty heavily invested (or at least infatuated with) autobahn. And honestly, if the flash player wasn't such a hog, the video quality is very impressive even before the premium levels.

Can someone with Mac OS X send me the nexdef dmg file? If you go to the Download Center and click on NexDef, then the Help tab, there's a disk drive image you can click on and it should start the dmg download. I've tried to do this with a spoofed User-Agent string and while it changes from exe to dmg in the text, it doesn't actually pop up the download dialog.

I'm wondering if there might be any java code we can use in the nexdef dmg like the pure autobahn dmg.

I think you can just click the help tab. I've tried extracting the exe and installing it in WINE but neither worked. When I try the installer in Linux it looks like Java though, so it might be possible to separate it out of the exe or dmg (I don't think mlb would bother making it available to Linux users).
I've actually booted into windows to use the flash player with NExDef. Image quality is great (it's even pretty good without it) but it's been pretty choppy.

I'm still waiting to pull the trigger on premium or standard, but to report my findings:
when I installed nexdef in wine it did install but would not run. I was using mozilla firefox. If I try to run it from the command line:

wine mlb-nexdef-autobahn.exe 
Swarmcast::jvmLauncherFunc() -- Creating JVM 
Runtime error #3(trap) in JET
Please, contact Excelsior Support Dept. at support@excelsior-usa.com

I'm not sure what to make of that, but I googled it a bit without any luck. It seemed to install fine in virtualbox but I haven't been able to test it since I haven't subscribed yet. Just thought I would show you my progress (or lack thereof).