kaput, did you patch the rtmpdump for live streams or is it 1.7 or newer? Flvstreamer should work unpatched but you'll have to rename the executable rtmpdump for now. I'll fix that when I'm convinced they aren't going to completely trash the architecture that's in place today. Historically, Spring Training has been last year's architecture and Opening Day has been something completely different.

snowpine, halobug, welcome! mlbviewer is an alternative to the Browser+Flash. It requires a bit of setup but you'll find that it performs a whole lot better than the flash application.

Easiest way to get started is grab it directly from SVN because any Spring Training changes haven't yet made it to the official Sourceforge release.

From there, follow the instructions in README, REQUIREMENTS-2009.txt or INSTALL.

There was a n900/maemo port of mlbviewer a year or two ago but I have no idea what the status is. You can search for it and contact that developer directly.

I myself do not have an n900 to test with so I have no knowledge of what works or doesn't work.

What I would suggest is downloading mlbviewer on a desktop/laptop Linux system, e.g. one you can play with and get to know how the application works. It is possible currently, though not very elegantly, to wrap shell scripts around the test tools I include in mlbviewer. If you can slap an icon on to the shell script, this could be a quick and easy way to get around the command-line "gui" of mlbviewer.

My best guess is that there's probably too many "moving parts" in the current mlbviewer solution (python, xml, soap, rtmpdump, mplayer, nexdef/java) that there could be any number of places where it may not be possible. Someone last year spent a huge amount of time trying to get mlbviewer working on their PS2/PS3 (don't remember which) just to find out that the hardware itself was getting in his way from getting it all to work correctly.

I wish you the best of luck and I hope that port project is still alive. Otherwise, I can answer specific mlbviewer inner workings questions. However, I'm not going to put in any effort to specifically support the n900 platform.

thanks, I'll have the hubby work on that one since he's the geek. I'm just the baseball nut.

What really ticks me off is that MLBtv worked perfectly (well as perfect as they can get) and worked great up until a couple of days ago. Then all of a sudden, the stream is flashing like crazy and it's MY fault? They are quick to blame my computer, my software, Linux etc. Why can't they ever admit THEY are the ones that 'broke what wasn't broken'??

grrrr...OK, I'm done venting. Thanks for the advice. fingers are crossed

Been a subscriber to MLB.TV for a few years now and I'm still amazed at how complex the service is and how it seems to work at all. Yeah, it's a shame that their flash client really isn't showcasing their service in the best light. Guessing that there's still a lot of debug code turned on and that performance will likely improve in mid to late April when the code plus the new nexdef is finished and stabilized.

As for customer service, there are some really, really rude and obnoxious subscribers in the support forums who seem to feel like the service should be flawless from day one and wipe their bum clean to boot. I suspect the support desk has both a high call rate and a high employee turnover. Even at $100+ a subscriber to MLBAM, I doubt they get paid enough to care about anything outside of their scripted roles. Don't take it personally. They likely have a checklist they have to run through plus they enter all that into a database so their managers can see they are actually doing their job. Phone support is a terrible job. As miserable as you felt for the time you spent on the phone with them, multiply that by 8 hours a day x 5 days a week and you get an idea how miserable they must feel. Bless them for wanting this job at all.

Quality support engineers realize very quickly that their passion and talents are being wasted on the phone bank.

anyone else having trouble with their mlbviewer?

mine doesn't seem to let me choose my game, it's stuck on the top game, won't change days or let me scroll down.

Thanks for a great product! I am happily watching Nomah on ESPN!

Any tips for using mlbviewer with a slower connection? My DSL out here in the country is a bit unreliable, sometimes if the connection is briefly interrupted, mplayer will lose the stream and I'll have to start over from the schedule menu. Any way to cache/buffer the game so I am a couple minutes behind, but the connection is smoother? (Am I on the right track increasing video_player=mplayer -cache from 2048 to 4096 or higher?)

i am excited about the season, and hopeful that once again mlbviewer will rescue my baseball watching experience! so daftcat, thanks again in advance for all of your hard work on this project!

i just tried to watch the sox game and am having no luck, even with the newest svn update. i am getting the following error:
not sure if i am missing something, or if we are just waiting for opening day. but it seemed like some people were having some luck, so i thought i would give it a shot...

just to clarify, when i try to highlight a different game, it says "refreshing listings" at the bottom and does not change. It does the same thing when I try to change days, but I can switch days using the "j" key. So basically, it's stuck on the top game in the list.

help! I'm the only one?? I'm wondering if my recent snow leopard update screwed something up, but I've tried what i could to reinstall stuff.

any ideas??

edit: it's working on my linux box... crap that means there's something wrong with my setup here...

if anyone has heard of this happening and found a way to fix it, let me know

that is the error I get when "nexdef" is on... trying hitting "N" key in mlbviewer and play it again

I added new keybindings for the RemotePad app on the iPhone. At the time, I hadn't figured out how to do arrow keys with RemotePad (basically turning the iPhone into a wifi keyboard and mouse), so I added some new keys. I went off what made sense for the iPhone keyboard.

Anyway, you can try these on your snow leopard setup (without the single quotes):

These aren't very intuitive except if you have an iPhone but at least you can see if those work instead of the arrow keys.

The other thing you can try is setting the TERM to either xterm or vt100. If you use vt100, certain things like colors may not work but you may get your arrow keys working again.

If those bindings work for you, I can probably map to some more intuitive keys, or possibly even create a proper keybindings feature with a config file. As I've said all spring, I'm hesitant to invest much development time until Opening Day just in case they have been hiding some big changes that need to be coded.

If however, they've kept the architecture the same from mlbviewer's perspective, my work for the season will revolve around major code clean up projects that should allow for rapid feature development like keybindings, more command-line options, possibly in-application configuration changes, etc.

Yes, you're on the right track with increasing the cache. Mplayer begins playback at the cache low water mark which is 20% cache size by default. So for a cache size of 2048, it's going to wait until it has 400 KB cached before it starts playing. That's 2400 Kilobits (KB * 8) or roughly 3 sec (2400 kb / 800 kbps) of stream. Not very much. On a slow connection, you're more likely to drain the cache than fill it.

So you actually have a couple of options now. You can increase the low water mark with the -cache-min option (as a percentage) so -cache-min 40 would double your 3 sec to 6 sec before playback begins and/or you can increase the amount of cache.

On my slower machine, I use a cache of 8192. Slower CPU but decent speed cable modem means I'm more likely to fill the cache than drain it. Using the calculations above and the default 20% low water mark, I'm going to cache 12 sec before playback with up to 60 sec available if the cache fills completely. If I double the cache-min (-cache-min 40), I'd have to wait until 24 sec were cached but the total cache size is still 60 sec.

By the way, this discussion should help everyone decide the amount of cache they want to use because these streams are seekable: fast-forward and pause should work in small increments depending on how much of the stream you have cached. If I were to pause for the full 60 sec, before resuming, I should be able to seek roughly 60 seconds forward before the stream needs to re-cache. In practice, though, something about the FLV streams from MLB makes it risky to jump more than a few seconds ahead at a time. In Spring Training, this amounts to being able to fast forward over some commercials but possibly incurring some re-caching delay.

Hope all that helps you more than it confuses you.

I should also add that if you are a premium subscriber, when the regular season begins, you'll be able to take advantage of nexdef's rate adaptation (which may or may not be a good thing if nexdef routinely kicks you down to the "lower bars.") Like the flash player, mlbviewer does make a best effort at locking in a specific bitrate as if you turned off the auto-select stream quality setting in the flash player. Another advantage of nexdef (assuming it hasn't changed much from last season) was the ability to jump to half innings. So if you're watching an archived game and get kicked off in the top of the 5th, you can restart the stream in the top of the 5th instead of having to watch the first four innings again.

yep those work!

I'll try xterm and vt100 and see what happens, but at least it's functional for me again...

Thanks for the tips on caching. You're right, I haven't had a chance to try the nexdef plugin yet due to spring training restrictions. Maybe that will improve the experience. I will play around with some different settings and report back in a week or so, perhaps my experience will be useful for others with slower connections. Yesterday was a good day (no squirrels jiggling the wires) and I was able to watch the 800kps streams no problem.

hmm, xterm did the same thing and a vt100 terminal session through an app called "datacomet" was the same.

Oh well, I can live with the ", and ." keys for now. Thanks daftcat!