I think I spoke too soon on the Mets/Reds stream from yesterday. While it's streaming, it looks like that stream is corrupt. I checked it in the flash viewer and it's screwed up there too.

It's over 5 hours long. It has the mlb channel dudes making predictions for the season for about 20 minutes with some corruption that makes mplayer crash for me, then it has the "mlb.tv stay tuned for action" video repeating over and over for 1 1/2 hours before the game finally starts. I verified that it's like this in the flash player also.

During the rtmpdump stream, rtmpdump crashed with an error message saying basically that the stream had ended and we should try rtmpdump with --resume option. From the log, it looked like we were running with --resume, but it was not working. rtmpdump just core dumped over and over until I hit ctrl-c. The I selected the game again in mlbdvr and it resumed at the spot it crashed. Thinking this might be the cause of the corruption, I stopped the stream after a while, deleted the file and restarted the download. It happened again at a different spot and again wouldn't resume the download (it tried, but kept getting the same error message from rtmpdump) until I hit ctrl-c again and restarted the download.

This just happened again while I was writing this. Here's the debug output from rtmpdump I was able to capture:

DEBUG: flashVer: LNX 10,0,22,87
DEBUG: SeekTime: 8313305.000000
DEBUG: connected, hand shake:
DEBUG: HandShake: Type Answer : 03
DEBUG: HandShake: Server Uptime : 2023393549
DEBUG: HandShake: FMS Version : 3.0.3.1
DEBUG: handshaked
Connected...

Continuing at TS: 8313305 ms
Starting download at 794713.671 KB (45.3%)
DEBUG: GetNextMediaPacket, received: invoke 134 bytes
DEBUG: Property: <Name: no-name., STRING: _error>
DEBUG: Property: <Name: no-name., NUMBER: 1.00>
DEBUG: Property: NULL
DEBUG: Property: <Name: no-name., OBJECT>
DEBUG: Property: <Name: level, STRING: error>
DEBUG: Property: <Name: code, STRING: NetConnection.Connect.Rejected>
DEBUG: Property: <Name: description, STRING: [ AccessManager.Reject ] : Access denied!>
DEBUG: HandleInvoke, server invoking <_error>
ERROR: rtmp server sent error
DEBUG: GetNextMediaPacket, received: invoke 18 bytes
DEBUG: Property: <Name: no-name., STRING: close>
DEBUG: Property: <Name: no-name., NUMBER: 0.00>
DEBUG: HandleInvoke, server invoking <close>
ERROR: rtmp server requested close
WARNING: Download may be incomplete, try --resume!


Again, it worked fine when I manually resumed the download.

I was running it in Windows XP on virtualbox and seeing the same thing. I was having more problems with virtualbox though because it was eating up all of the resources I could allot. I am actually very impressed with the autobahn.jar file and I think it might deserve a separate thread, because it kind of competes with all of the work that daftcat is doing. I just downloaded it, ran it in a terminal window as described in the post and connected to the game normally from firefox (err iceweasel) and it automagically connected with nexdef.

Not all of the features seem to work (i.e. highlights, watching multiple feeds at the same time, and some of the other buttons) but the dvr part seems to be working great as well as the hi-def working about the same as it did in Windows. The only thing that I am still struggling with is full screen, but that might just be a 64-bit linux flash thing.

I'm seriously thinking about chucking rtmpdump except there's no alternative yet. Like I said earlier though, I'm stubborn and I'll keep looking for ways to make mlbviewer work again.

MLB.com is going through their usual April growing pains.

So is mlbviewer.

Can't say the same about rtmpdump.

Maybe by the time MLB.com has their act together, Adobe will have released their specification and work will be well underway for a real rtmp client. Adobe said first half of 2009. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I'm going to add an 'f' key and have it launch the flash player in your favorite browser. This is something of a compromise between the curses interface and the flash player. At least you won't have to mess with mlb.com media center.

I'm also going to have another look at gnash, a standalone flash player, and rtmpy, an rtmp library for python.

I've added live game support to mlbdvr.py....

HOWEVER...

It's not producing any recognizable video stream.

I think the WriteStream() method is writing an older format file.

I guess it's time I learned the H.264 format and see what's going wrong.

In other news, I've fixed a lot of minor functionality from last season such as...

+ in progress games are bold again
+ local blackout shows up in status according to blackout config option
+ archived games are indicated like last year so no more guesswork
+ finally decided to catch errors after all but if debug is set, let them all drop through (yeah, I had decided this last year but forgot to enforce it recently)

So where are we?

Archived games will download but not completely. The download should resume, but not reliably.

Live games produce broken video.

Archived audio theoretically supported but not tested as mlb.com hasn't archived any audio yet.

Live audio supported. Seems to be the only bright spot.

Audio follow, Top Plays, and Condensed Games not supported yet.

I recommend looking into H.264. It's a great format. Is rtmpdump writing the raw h.264 data or is it putting it in a container with audio?

I tried reading both the rtmpdump code and h264. Both were making my head swim last night. Maybe this weekend I'll get myself a tall strong coffee drink and dive into it again.

And mplayer won't play it?

As a (hopefully) temporary compromise between flash which supports live games and rtmpdump which does not, I've added an 'f' key. Highlight a a listing and press 'f' and it will open the flash page in your browser of choice. The default is firefox. To use something else, add flash_browser configuration option. You can use %s in the command as a placeholder if you want to get fancy with your commands

Example:

(since opera produces errors about X shared memory extension on my system.)

By the way, opera does not seem to support nexdef using the autobahn.jar method.

Not on my systems anyway. But it's checked in if you want to give it a try. There's a game coming up in 30 minutes.

It looks like rtmpdump is writing in an older flv format rather than the newer h264 so the x264 in mplayer is complaining about "consumed only 1 bytes instead of ..." I'm guessing it meant it choked on the first byte which is supposed to say, among other things, what kind of video frame it is (I, P, B, or S)

Why can't I see any of the live audio streams?

I'm using the latest SVN of mlbviewer.
I've got suds and python-xml installed.
I patched rtmpdump as instructed.

When I start the program (python ./mlbviewer.py), every game gives me "Unknown Flag" in the listing and a "No stream available for selected game" error if I try to play the audio.

EDIT: Nevermind. Apparently mlbviewer.py isn't in use anymore, and mlbdvr.py is the one to use, even if you're not using video or DVR.

I'm at rev. 144 and the "f" key doesn't seem to do anything. Is it in svn?

EDIT: Doh! mlbdvr.py, not mlbviewer. Sorry.

Just to be clear, since the Nats game is coming up soon, and I'm still having the same issues I experienced last night (even using the DVR launcher), if you can't or don't use Flash, audio will still not work, correct? Trying to launch game audio (using the "a" key) gives me an "uncaught error" and nothing appears in the log file in ~/.mlb.

Testing it on the Windows brower-box shows that the stream is in fact active and streaming, so the URL should be live.

I've used mlbviewer to pipe audio from my headless home server to the stereo system. Obviously, if Flash is a requirement moving forward, this solution is less than ideal!

mlbviewer.py hasn't been updated for 2009.

Use mlbdvr.py.

'a' should work for live games. No clue if it will work for archived games.

As for uncaught error, those things truly piss me off because they never appear when I stop catching errors. I checked in a new revision which should produce a traceback instead of the "Uncaught error". Please post the full text of that traceback here or email it to the straycat000 address in your README-2008.txt file.

Flash isn't a requirement for audio. In fact, audio is about the only thing that actually works well today.

If it doesn't get reported, it won't get fixed.

Since you appear to be having the same issues as me, what distro are you running--perhaps this is wherein the problem lies--I've got Opensuse 11.1 x86_64.

You know, guys, I'm pretty damn impressed with the flash player especially with nexdef finally working on linux. I'm also pretty happy with the 'f' key hack. Not having to go through that bandwidth hungry mlb.com site (and all its spyware-ish tracking cookies and crap) is really making me happy.

I was able to switch the home vs away video feeds, use the dvr, open the box score and the highlights, and more. I think they are even making performance improvements. I had one bar less than full bars and while you could see h264 working its magic (e.g. the picture was crisp but the motion wasn't seamless), the audio was in sync with the picture.

Still, I'm not yet ready to concede defeat. Gameday audio archived is, indeed supported, but rtmpdump is not able to download the full stream like with archived video. I should say, I have been able to download the stream with a modified soapevent.py. I'll be checking in gamedayaudio.py and verifying archived audio works with mlbdvr.py later tonight. I also got a bug report in my soap error handling that I'll probably have, if not a fix, more debugging to help me track it down.

So my audio-only users, any successes or failures?