Is it the case that, once the regular season starts, the only streams that will be available will be the rtmp streams of flash video (I am probably mangling my terminology horribly here), as MLB are saying that, for the new season the old Silverlight player, and the alternative to play in Windows Media Player will no longer be supported, only the new flash player will be. If this is the case, will mplayer be able to play the flash video streams via the rtmp protocol? If not, what players are there that might be able to?

If the World Baseball Classic is any indication of future success, mlbviewer should be able to play the basic rate 800K streams only for the coming season. mlbviewer will not be able to dynamically adjust the speed for higher or lower quality nor support the higher bitrates including HD because there is no Linux version of the NexDef plugin. In addition, mlbviewer will continue to support the 2008 archived games in both the 400K basic and 800K premium speeds. 1.2M for 2008 will not be supported because no Linux NexDef. 2007 archives will also be supported in both the 700K premium and I believe it was 350K basic. No attempt will be made to support archived games before the 2007 season. Lastly, there are ways to watch the Baseball's Best games. I'd be happy to explain this if you like.

mplayer has been able to play the flash video streams of the WBC. But as they say in investing, past experience is no guarantee of future success. I'm still anxiously awaiting Opening Day to see what mlbviewer and mplayer do and don't support. However, I don't really expect it to be much different than last year.

The best thing to do is to subscribe to this thread so that should there be any updates to mlbviewer, or any news on what mlbviewer/mplayer does and does not support, you can be notified via email.

I would be interested to know how you are getting at the flash streams. I have fetched the latest version of mlbviewer from svn, and that is still accessing the windows media streams (400K for Spring Training and 600K for WBC). Those windows media streams (with playback scenarios of "MLB_WM_400K_STREAM" and "MLB_WM_600K_STREAM") are presumably the ones that will no longer be supported once the regular season starts.

I have managed to write a bit of Java that goes through the authentication process associated with the new media player (that MLB say will be the only one supported), and got URLs for the various flash streams (with playback scenarios of "MLB_FLASH_164K_STREAM", "MLB_FLASH_400K_STREAM", "MLB_FLASH_600K_STREAM", "MLB_FLASH_800K_STREAM"). These URLS are of the form

rtmp://<servername>/ondemand/mp4:secure/mlbam/<year>/<month>/<date>/<streamname>.mp4?aifp=v0004&auth=<authorisationstring>&slist=secure/mlbam/<year>/<03>/<12>/<streamname>.mp4&ct5=<date>&ct6=<ipaddress>&ct7=<contentid>:<playbackscenario>&ct8=1&ct1=mlb&ct3=<ip id>&ct=mlb

And the URL field for the "MLB_FLASH_SWARMCLOUD" looks like it is just an authentication string.

Have you managed to get these URLs to work with mplayer, or are you accessing the flash streams (as opposed to the window media streams accessed by mlbviewer) some other way?

Aha! I knew they'd throw a wrench in the works on Opening Day. I thought it would be too good to be true to think everything would just work the same as it did last year. MLB is ridiculously notorious for changing the way things work every single Opening Day and giving everyone (but especially Linux users) a giant headache.

I wasn't aware that a new authentication model or stream url was going to be necessary. I'm not terribly good with java but can you share your authentication code with me? I'll see what I can do to get it implemented by Opening Day. Hopefully, they'll run a few more Flash player beta tests before Opening Day.

That would also account for why the basic rate flash stream in the flash player looks crisper (better quality) than the basic rate windows media stream. They are different streams. Duh! That should have been obvious to me. I'll readily admit that I'm more of a network guy than a media guy. If they run some more beta tests, I'll be sure to run the flash player through HTTPAnalyzer to see what's going on and try to implement the new model as soon as I can. Though it has been a real pain trying to use the Flash player not through any technical difficulties but the timing is all bad for me. I'm usually at work or otherwise not around when the live games are on and they don't have the new architecture online for archives yet (except during their controlled testing times.)

Good news is they are testing again tonight--Boston vs. New York. Bad news is "tonight" is Eastern time and I'm on the west coast. I will do my best to get out of work early enough this afternoon/evening to capture some HTTPAnalyzer dumps of the flash player.

(I saw Boston AT New York in Yankee Stadium last year. What an awesome first and only game for me at the old Yankee Stadium!)

I saw Tampa Bay at Yankee Stadium opening day the prior year. Very cool experience. I'm not sure I'd be able to handle Sox and Yanks fans in the same stadium at the same time.

Anyway, I wanted to post a plea for help with the LIRC stuff again. LIRC was automatically configured in Knoppmyth when I installed it, so I don't have any knowledge of it. If anybody has this set up or has an idea how to set it up, could you please lend me a hand?

Thanks.

As I don't have an LIRC setup myself, whoever has a working configuration file, can you please share that with me as well? I'd be happy to include a sample config in the mlbviewer distribution to help others out.

I take it you know about the WBC games that have been running in archive for the last week, such as the Mexico v Cuba game from March 12th:

Mexico v Cuba
Venezuela v Puerto Rico
USA v Puerto Rico

I'm afraid that my Java is extremely rough and ready, I have just been writing it on the fly as I try to get to grips with this new player. I'll see if I can clean it up enough to be able to send on to you.

I have the opposite problem with game times, any evening games (even on the east coast) are after midnight here, and I just can't cope with the late nights.

Okay, the best I can come up with in the short amount of time that I've looked at this is that it's a bigger mess than I previously thought.

I am almost definitely going to need your java code to sort this out.

It looks like, and I hope I'm wrong:

Currently, they have calendar_event_id's hardcoded for the beta trial in json at:
http://mlb.mlb.com/scripts/mp4_beta.js

Hopefully they'll have a dynamic json page for the regular season. I much prefer json because it's easier to parse and we already have a lot of json code for parsing and creating the listings.

They also have an xml listings page that is dynamic at:
http://gdx.mlb.com/components/game/m...day_24/epg.xml

I don't like xml much because I will have to write my own xml parser to convert the xml into python data.

But here's where I'm very concerned and I hope that either it's easier than I think or there is an easier way to do this.

It looks like they are getting some security fingerprint from a certificate authority and then generating soap request(s) to get the rtmp url.

From there, we'll encounter a bit of trouble. Mplayer and vlc don't support rtmp. There might be some rtmp downloaders out there that actually work on Linux. I'm looking into this.

I guess it was a stroke of luck that I started work on mlbdvr.py. Assuming we can get the rtmp url and a working downloader, we'll likely have to record the stream and then use a player process to play the downloaded flv.

Another stroke of luck is that I will have Opening week off of work. I hadn't actually planned to spend it hacking mlbviewer/mlbdvr but I will have a few more hours than I usually do to see what I can make of it. I'd rather have it all working before then but that may not be realistic. At least the flash player works with Linux so you're not left high and dry while I get this all sorted.

CubsFanUk, I eagerly await your java code. In the meantime, can you confirm my observations? Where are you getting the id and fingerprint for the soap request? Or did you find a way around using soap?

Thanks!
Matthew

CubsFan,

Here's one that might be at a more reasonable hour for you.

http://mlb.mlb.com/flash/mediaplayer...362-2009-03-16

That should start 16:05 UTC tomorrow.

I think you have got the link slightly wrong, that was the link to the Venezuela v Puerto Rico game. The link you intended was:

Yankees v Phillies

Also, the start time is actually 17:05 UTC (which is the same as GMT), but the stream usually starts about an hour or so before the start of the game. Also, in case anyone missed it, this game will be free.

Regarding fingerprints in the SOAP message, if you mean the field called session-key, this is the value in the cookie called ftmu. I'm not entirely clear how this cookie is initially fetched yet, I've got a bit more research to do. At the moment, I am copying it over from running the version of the Java that fetches the url for the old media player, it is included in the response to that request. On the other hand the values in the fields called identity-point-id and fingerprint are in the response to the login request.

As for a downloader, I have absolutely no clue, sorry.

OK, I see what you mean about the session key. Just running the flash player does not fetch that value into a cookie, and I'm not sure about the mechanics of fetching it from the certificate authority site. Perhaps, a workaround would be to fetch the authenticated url for a known archived game from before this year (then discarding the url and logging out), in order to get the ftmu cookie. The value in that cookie can then be used for the session key.

By the way, going back to the issue of calendar event id, at the moment I get that from the epg.xml file, but I also have some code to get it from:

http://mlb.mlb.com/gen/multimedia/detail/<year>/<month>/<date>/<final six digits of "mid">.xml

Still xml, but it is always there, even for games with no game_media entry in the EPG. However, I would guess that, once the new player is the default player, the gamesbydate.jsp file will have the calendar event id in it (but who knows).

Have you checked out rtmpdump?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rtmpdump/

Thanks for that, Theophile, I will have a look at it (when I have the time).

daftcat, I have emailed you (from the forum) a link to fetch my Java (can't see a way of attaching files here).