All of a sudden this week I've been unable to access any away feeds. I've got "video_follow=chc" in my config and when I try access any archived road Cub games I get "Stream URL not found in reply. Stream may not be available yet." Same when I follow any other team that's on the road. If video_follow includes the home team, or if it only contains invalid team letters, then the home stream downloads fine.

Has something changed with the way MLBAM does away feeds? Are they still available? Or have the team codes changed or something?

I've got one device on mlbviewer v367 and another on v367 with the same problem on both... Also seems to persist for both nexdef and standard streams. Is anybody else seeing this behavior?

I just noticed that the problem also persists when video_follow is empty and "coverage=away" is set. So the problem isn't limited to the video_follow setting but seems to occur for away video streams in general. Also, "audio_follow=chc" still seems to work as expected...

I've added a couple of debug features to svn v369.

1. Successful media replies are logged to ~/.mlb/successful.xml and unsuccessful replies are logged to ~/.mlb/unsuccessful.xml. Stream not found errors are actually successful from MLBAM's perspective (e.g. the status code is 1 even though there is no url in the reply.)

2. In test directory, there is a new tool called mediaxml.py. Run test/mediaxml.py over successful.xml file to parse the reply in a more human readable format.

It's not written yet to handle unsuccessful.xml files well. If you want it to handle unsuccessful.xml files, post them to pastebin.com so I have a larger sample size than the one or two I have encountered.

3. The 'z' key has both the media listings and the prefer listings. This is not a new feature. It's been there for a long time. But it may shed some light here. The first block enclosed in brackets after datetime() is the video listings, away first, then home. It looks like this:

Each listing is enclosed in () and the four elements are call letters, team code, content id, and event id.

Team codes are listed in MLBviewer/mlbtv.py. But you should recognize the call letters anyway.

If you still can't figure it out with these tools, please post the .xml to pastebin.com and tell me what the video_follow setting was.

By the way, video_follow is additive. That means if chc plays cin and you have video_follow lines for both chc and cin, well, I'm not exactly sure which one would be selected. But I've run into that before where I had both bos and kc. They played each other. I wanted the kc broadcast and got the bos broadcast. I had to comment video_follow=bos out for that series.

For the record, I've tried a few games and it seems to be working okay for me. Please tell me specific games (day and teams) and which was configured for video_follow so I can try to reproduce this myself.

Hmm, streams from the past few days seem to be working for me now too. But some older games are still broken -- I just retried the Rangers, Mets, and Cubs feeds from 5/2/2012 with those teams' codes set (hitting "o" shows "video_follow = ['nym', 'tex', 'chc']"), and I get the Stream URL not found error for all of those streams.

Maybe MLBAM just did something funny with away streams for a few days and is now back to normal? Sorry that as usual I don't have time to debug this properly...

Ah, so now that I'm having the same problem again with the away feeds, I checked the mlb website and realized that away feeds are only supposed to be available to premium subscribers (which I am not). In fact, that seems to be the only difference between premium and regular, except for better device compatibility.

So, I guess no away feeds is expected, and they were only doing them as a freebie in April. Seems a bit cheeky of them since away feeds came as part of basic last year, but hey, it'll force me to hear some other announcers for a change!

Anyway, I think the proper fix for non-premium subscribers is simply to comment out any video_follow lines from the config. Luckily, the Cubs are in Milwaukee this weekend so I get to hear Uecker anyway!

Hey daftcat...

Last year I posted a patch for the mlbplay.py script (I noticed that the TV station call letters always came from the away team. I was able to fix it.):
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post4453196

Apparently you didn't get around to merging it into your code. Maybe now? Thanks in advance . I'm attaching a "new" patch with the current line numbers.

Attached Files

mlbplay.py.diff.txt (360 Bytes, 10 views)

That's odd because the grid.xml lists both home and away streams for fms_cloud (basic.) As long as the grid.xml shows both, I can't do anything in the listings page to indicate whether the stream will be available or not.

Can you reproduce one of those "Stream not available" errors with an away stream? First, remove both the xml files (successful and unsuccessful) from ~/.mlb. (rm ~/.mlb/*.xml) Then select one of these unavailable streams. Finally, whichever file gets created (I suspect it will actually be a successful.xml), post the contents to pastebin.com.

I might not be able to do anything with the listings page, but there may be some additional information in the media response xml that I can put in the error message beside just "Stream not available." It also may not be what you think it is depending on what the response xml has in it.

Thanks in advance!

Checked in.

Sure thing. I actually got both files -- to be clear, what I did was open mlbviewer.py with video_follow set to the visiting team (chc in this case), navigate to the date, remove both xml files from .mlb/, and hit enter.

That gave me .mlb/successful.xml: http://pastebin.com/imUkS00u
And .mlb/unsuccessful.xml: http://pastebin.com/hyH1S5is

Hope that helps!

Have you been doing any hacking? The requests are for playback-scenario = HTTP_CLOUD_MOBILE and subject = MLBMOBILE_GAMEDAY_AUDIO (and to make it worse, the content-id is for a video content type.) These are values I never request. I don't see how I would have made the request in successful.xml.

It's okay if you are hacking. I just need to know that because I can't figure out how I would arrive at these values with my untouched code.

EDIT:
Wow! Okay, I take that back. I was overwriting successful.xml because I make two requests so I've never seen the values in the first request if the second request is successful. I am indeed not requesting those values so the server is just picking them for me.

I have uploaded a patch for this in revision 371. Not sure if that's what was going on and if that will fix your specific issue but it might help to be making correct requests from the start.

I'm not sure how much use this will be to most of you but it will be of great use to me when I have to debug media request errors (Stream URL not found.) Since there are two requests per media location, I have split the log files into (un)successful-1.xml and (un)successful-2.xml.

I have also made modifications to the playbackScenario and subject fields in the first request. I'm not really sure if those are going to fix anything but it would be helpful if people of any and all subscription levels update to this revision and reassure me that I haven't broken anything with these edits.

Thanks!

Lol, yeah, I don't think I've made any changes to the versions I have running, so I'm glad you could figure out where the odd xml content was coming from. I do still get the same behavior when trying to load away streams -- if you're interested I've pastebinned the new xml files:

successful-1.xml: http://pastebin.com/wWuzzUDW
unsuccessful-2.xml: http://pastebin.com/6uAwaKAG

These are from trying to load the away stream on the Phillies-Cubs game from May 17.

Oh, and nothing else broken that I can see so far!

HTH!

It helps. I think. Both have scenario = HTTP_CLOUD_WIRED which is a Nexdef stream. You said you are a regular, not premium subscriber. Make sure use_nexdef=0 in your ~/.mlb/config. Please retry that request without nexdef enabled.

I have been having hesitations and pauses in the stream. I am a premium subscriber with nexdef enabled. This has been going going on for some time. I have thought that it is either mplayer2 or possibly a problem with my connection to my provider, but do not know how to narrow it down. I have tried several versions of mplayer2. I am using Gentoo on three different machines and it occurs on all of them. Sometimes the stream pauses so frequently or stops altogetther that mlbviewer must be stopped and restarted. This usually seems to improve its behavior for a while. I have tried the latest mplayer2 pulled from the git at mplayer2's website and currently I am using Gentoo's mplayer2 version 2.0_p20120309. I will provide whatever information would be helpful.

Tom C