Which Sox?

P.S. there are only 2 wrong answers

The Sox who are managed by a bald white guy who likes to rock back and forth and spit sunflower seeds.

2010 Subscriptions are now open for business on MLB.com, and already the forums are filling up with loud, obnoxious, ungrateful customers. I would once again like to take a moment to thank all of you for being the patient, respectful, and understanding fans that you are. I know if this forum ever had as much fury as the official forum, I would have been out of here long ago.

Just a few things:

1. I expect spring training to work (or not work) just as the 2009 season did. So if Spring Training games work, that doesn't mean regular season will work.

2. I expect change. I've been an MLB.TV subscriber for 4 seasons now and no season's service was ever like the last season.

3. I will try to stay on top of the changes. However, like last season, mlbviewer may not be fully functional on opening day. Like MLB.TV's own service, things might not be smooth until the rough and rocky first month is out of the way. And like Linux itself, patience is a system requirement.

4. No guarantees. I will do everything within my schedule and limited Linux superpowers to support whatever changes might come our way. But if MLB.TV continues to insist on closed technology like Flash, they may throw a technological hurdle that can't be overcome. With that said, please consider the possibility that mlbviewer may not support 2010 season and weigh that risk when deciding to purchase or renew your MLB.TV subscription.

All of that out of the way, I am encouraged by two things. First, MLB.TV hasn't announced a new content partner. So they are probably sticking with the Yahoo deal. Thus the content delivery architecture will probably remain largely unchanged. Second, early peaks at the April XML files don't reveal any big changes. However, that second one can change at any time between now and Opening Day.

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If they do throw a curveball (see what I did there?) I'll be certain to try what I can to help. Pulling data off the autobahn applet was a major coup last year and I really hope things will keep working smoothly.

I've noticed that Boxee now has support for MLB.TV and from the looks of it, love games will be included. Boxee does a weird thing for flash streams where (I think) they do something like a screen capture from the browser-based flash player then scale and size it to the display. The archived games I've watched with it are nowhere close to the quality obtainable with mlbviewer tho so I'll trade the flashy GUI for high bitrates any day. ;-)

By the way, I just sent Daftcat a Paypal donation and you should too!

Thanks, Theophile!

I see MLB.com has started asking for subscribers to MLB.tv for the 2010 season, and they still refuse to support GNU/Linux. Once things get started I'll have to look at a small subscription and try it with your app. (There's no way my budget will support a full subscription. Unless I win PowerBall or something.)

They unofficially do support Linux. Well, they did last year anyway. It remains to be seen how they implement things this year.

Last year, the same Flash app works on all platforms that have an Adobe Flash plugin. An MLB.TV exec was nice enough to upload the jar file for the NexDef plugin with instructions on how to use it. So there was no missing functionality for Linux. Yes, there is no official support in the sense that Tech Support and the support forums will outright tell you Linux is not supported. There is one other wrinkle to this problem. The Flash plugin for Linux does not have the same performance (if you can ever say Flash performs well) as on Windows or MacOS X. Still, my experience was that the games were still watchable at low to mid-range bandwidths though Flash.

Frankly, I side with MLB.TV on this matter, though. There are hundreds of Linux distributions and probably a dozen other platforms that are just flat left out like XBox and PS3. But when you look at the subscriber numbers, these are low penetration markets. It's not worth the development cost to please a few hundred to several thousand alternative platform users when the core business revenue comes from the million or so subscribers on the two traditional platforms.

That said, I think it's superb of them to support iPhone (and soon iPad) even though the iPhone isn't exactly a high performance platform. It's a bit of a risk to showcase a high quality product on a lower quality device. They fortunately have the network architecture to reduce the quality for iPhone. I wonder if they will have a two tier quality structure for iPhone vs. iPad (and iPhone 4G which we all know is coming soon and will likely be the iPad hardware shrunk back down to the iPhone form factor.)

Where does mlbviewer fit into this? Mostly by accident (as evidenced by the Adobe vs rtmpdump backlash), there are ways around using the Flash plugin to get at Flash video. (Though this may change!) MLB.TV is aware of the mlbviewer project and mostly just tolerates it. The only direct communication I have received from them is that they will be the unofficial provider of the NexDef plugin and that we shouldn't repost their jar file. Mlbviewer downloads number in the hundreds. That's pitifully small. Every so often, I search Google and MLB.TV support forums for queries about Linux and MLB.TV support. I can pretty much say that whoever is looking for Linux and MLB.TV support will find it so I know just how small that market is. I have to admit that my support of mlbviewer is nearly selfish. I'm not a full-time Linux user by any stretch, but I do have an older Linux laptop that I use as a media server. The Paypal donations do help motivate me to continue development past "what works for me."

If money is a concern, I recommend holding off on buying a subscription for the first month. MLB.TV will be offering free beta test broadcasts over Spring Training and probably into April. In the meantime, expect their service to be buggy in April regardless. I'm not even sure mlbviewer will work with 2010 since they seem to change their service every year. And mlbivewer will probably be buggy in April if anything changes in MLB.TV service this year.

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I agree with you that supporting GNU/Linux would be a major pain in MLB's rump, but for some odd reason I still find myself clicking my heels together and saying "There's nothing like MLB on GNU/Linux".

I had forgotten about the free trial. I'll have to give it a shot so I can help test mlbviewer for you. It's a shame that we have to rely on Flash. I don't know if you're aware of the Minitube app for viewing YouTube vids without Flash, but they may have some ideas that could be pulled into mlbviewer. Your time permitting, of course.

I've been watching the new posts in my email every day, partly because I have yet to be able to find a way to shoehorn the cost of MLB.tv into my very fixed income, but I want to take this opportunity to say how much I appreciate all your work on the mlbviewer year after year. Devs being devs, there's no way MLB.tv devs won't change things for the new season, but the sheer number of users who watch and participate in this thread show quite clearly how beneficial your app is, even with MLB.tv seeming to go out of their way to make keeping up with the changes hard on you. I'll have to find a way to send a donation your way whether or not I use the app. It's devs like you that make the open source community, and the GNU/Linux community in particular, such a wonderful community to be a part of.

You rock.

I might look into Minitube but at the moment, it kind of scares me. I'm not really a programmer; more like a monkey-see, monkey-do hacker. I know very little C++ and no Qt. The minitube source might as well be written in Greek. I might have a look at the rtmp portion though, if in fact, they are using rtmp. I know YouTube is moving away from Flash and using HTML5 (or something like that) which is how YouTube is available on the iPhone despite the lack of Flash support (which btw I wholly support Apple's decision to nix Flash on iPhone and iPad devices.)

Games are almost here. Just got my notice that I'm auto-subscribed for this season. After a few minutes of "oh crap! which paycheck is this coming from?", I'm now excited to see baseball again. iPhone app coming on Sunday! w00t! Probably won't get any idea of the changes they've made to this year's service until the last couple weeks of Spring training, though.

I know what you mean about the source code, If I were to look at the source it would be as good as Sanskrit. I want to take a look at the source for Webilder to see is I could figure out a way to add PNG support but I've been putting it off because I know it would end up being time out of my life I'd never get back.

Thanks for taking the time to look at Minitube. I didn't know if it would be helpful or not.

Bring on the baseball!

Yes, they are going to be creating a new HTML5 implementation of youtube utilizing the shiny new video tag. I am all for Flash dying as quickly as possibly, and not having it on the iPhone certainly will help to kill it.

However, dark forces may also be at work in the HTML5 department. So far, the W3C has been indecisive on the issue of video (and audio) codecs in relation to the corresponding HTML5 tags. Just like happened with GIF images and MP3 audio, I expect the patent holders on top-of-the-line video codecs (e.g. MPEG-4 parts 2 and 10) to initially license their codecs for next to nothing (or indeed nothing). Once HTML5 and its video tag have made the codec ubiquitous, then all the patent holders have to do is squeeze--start charging ridiculous amounts for licensing. Consumers either pay through the nose to use the codec, or they simply don't get video. It mirrors the rise of MP3 so closely it is sickening (look into how much it costs to license MP3 technology nowadays). Of course, the patent holders aren't really to blame here: why else do companies patent stuff in a capitalistic economy? To make money.

This places Google in a unique position. Since they chose to rework youtube in HTML5, which is still a working draft and not a completed recommendation from the W3C, they get to choose their codec(s) before the W3C has fully spoken on the topic (although I don't think the W3C will end up making any recommendation on the issue). If they choose a licensed codec, then the battle may well already be lost. However, if they choose a patent-free codec, we may all be able to freely enjoy the HTML5 video tag--and that's really what the Internet is about, freedom. Youtube controls such a vast majority of internet video (at least if you discount certain "specialty" media) that this choice will probably make or break the video tag.

I think Google wants to do the right thing. They claim to support open standards, and in the past have done so. However, the major stumbling block here is the fact that all of youtube (AFAIK) is already encoded with MPEG-4 part 10 (h.264).

OK, I think I'm done now.

I know what you mean. I thought about it in January or so, but the unplanned payment still snuck up on me. However, it means baseball is back!

Thanks for all your work, datcat.

hi,

is anyone else trying mlbviewer today for the first mlb.tv spring training game - mets vs. braves? when i try to play the game in mlbviewer as usual, mlbviewer exits and i get this

can anyone tell me what this means? do i have a setup problem or is this happening bcause i have only purchased a standard account this year? if so, what can i do to repair?

i can't even run debug.

thanks so much,
markus
still a newbie

It looks to me like it is looking for your "favorite team" and they aren't playing today. Try commenting out the line "favorite=..." in the file ~/.mlb/config and see if that helps.

Edit: to comment out the line, simply place a "#" character at the start of the line.