I know it doesn't really help you but using the mms link like you suggested worked perfectly with mplayer.

If someone knows how I can get mplayer to dump my config / settings would probably be most helpful. The only change I made from the stock / default mplayer setup (that came from the Arch repos) is to add this line:

to ~/.mplayer/config. But I don't think that has anything to do with the problem you're having.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

EDIT: Just to clarify if you launch it from the command line like I have to make sure you enclose the URL with ' ' since it won't work without.

In past years, I've complained to mlb.com about annoying their linux users, but I've always been able to find a decent workaround to get the gameday audio working. With this switch to silverlight, I've finally reached the point where I don't care anymore. They're moving in a direction that will probably make it eventually impossible. It's too bad they're a monopoly and I'm powerless to do anything about it; I'm just going to live with simple web page updates. At least I won't be giving them any money.

Does anyone have any experience canceling a subscription? I hope they aren't weasels about it or it takes forever (though it is just the $15 plan).

Oh, and I'm an A's fan, so it's easy to not be so into baseball these days!

I've been following this closely and I just wanted to add one finding. As of opening day, I've been stalling out when I open the MLB Player. It doesn't even ask for my log-in information. It just sits there, apparently attempting to load something, because it says something like "read mlb.gdx.com" at the bottom. (That's not exactly right, but I don't have it in front of me.) This was true whether I ran Firefox on my Windows computer or my Linux computer.

Then it occurred to me to turn off the Ad Blocker Plus add-on. That made a big difference. Now whatever Flashplayer script was stalling is able to run, and MLB Player asks me for my log-in and the subsequent links are more responsive. But it still doesn't connect with a stream when I choose a feed. On my Windows computer, I installed Silverlight, and now everything works perfectly. Obviously, that's not an option in Linux.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

[QUOTE=ilikerobots;3107712]I saw the same thing until I turned AdBlock off. After I turned AdBlock off I saw what the others have described and was able to play a GameDay Audio feed through VLC (thank god).

This will almost certainly be the last year I pay for a feed, the service has gotten progressively worse every year I've subscribed.

I cancelled last year about two weeks into the season. I reached an operator after about an hour, he tried to tell me that I probably could not get cancelled. I insisted and he submitted the cancellation request. After a few days my credit card account was eventually credited in full. I have not subscribed this year, and don't think I will. By the way, opening day is usually a disaster for MLB media.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/2008...jpDxNdqQsjtBAF

Thanks! Disabled ad-block and got the same as well. Nice job everyone.

Yeah, I'm assuming now is a pretty lousy time to do anything with their customer service. It would probably be better to call, though.

I hope you registered your displeasure with their technology choices!

reid

For those who have tried with mixed success to employ my VLC-through-WINE trick I mentioned back on page 4, the technique in the third post on page 1 of this thread actually works better. I didn't realize you can create a dummy "exe" file containing a bash script which will launch mplayer, but you can and it works. Rather than trying to stream the feed to myself, I can now just use Firefox in WINE to launch mplayer then close out the browser.

That said, this afternoon I'm going to try to set up a system (either a dedicated box or vmware) to stream the 1.2M feed to my MythTV box. If I get it working, I'll post back.

No dice on streaming the 1.2M feeds. It relies on a browser plugin and won't work in an external player.

However, now I'm having trouble with the 400k and 800k feeds. In mplayer and VLC the video is garbled and distorted. Is anyone else noticing this?

Following up on that, I found I had to wget the mURL (which points to web.servicebureau etc). Then inside the xml document that is retrieved as a result of that is a mms url to akamai. Running mplayer with this url (surrounded with single ticks) worked fine. I'm listening to Pat Hughes and Ron Santo right now.

I think you also have to be sorta quick to grab that akamai URL because it dies quickly.

MLB.com is going to have a mini-gameday soon. maybe there will be a non-silverlight audio feed embedded in that.

Thanks for the info all. I'm a subscriber of Gameday Audio (just listen to games when I'm at work). I got my stream working using Firebug to sniff out the mUrl. But I don't have vlc installed here at work, and gmplayer was giving me errors. Instead, I just pasted the url directly into a firefox window, and it connected just fine.

While I'd rather not play through firefox (I often close it accidentally, and there's no fast forward features available on reopening!), atleast I have the audio working again.

Thanks!
Ryan

Just registered to say thank you to all of you for the firebug hint. Added plus is that I can now run mplayer -vf cropdetect mms://... the first time around and then run with the crop output to get rid of the new annoying black bars. But I can watch baseball now. (To the A's fan... try being a Giants fan right now.)

I'm now also looking to try to automate this all, browser-free, with some sort of python approach. Unfortunately, I don't really know much about what's going on with the firebug output. Does anyone have any hints about where I could find out where the info in console is coming from?

Since people seem to be saying that mplayer (at least through the firebug method) works better than wine's firefox VLC (which gives me audio, but the distorted video), has anyone tried installing mplayer and its firefox plugin into the wined firefox? Might that cause the video to be undistorted, or is the copy-paste-shell method necessary?

The wine-firefox-vlc video problem visually resembles a typical codec issue, so I don't see why the elaborate shell method would make it work better than the mplayer browser plugin.

Works for me, thanks.

Hoth,

You can have Firefox (wine) directly pass the URL to mplayer in Linux without using Firebug. No VLC necessary.

Although, it looks like they started using a different video codec because it was working fine yesterday but today I had to recompile mplayer and vlc to get the playback to work.