[dols]

dols,

I'm trying it out but I've hit a glitch. Upon starting the plugin, I get a dialog that says:

Retrieved 0 items

And it stays there. I've tried running it as a script too and the menu appears but it appears to be static and no navigation is possible.

The XBMC log doesn't appear to register anything beyond the selection of the plugin. Any ideas?

It's actually a script so it should go into your My Scripts directory. I have only tested with mouse navigation instead of LIRC so I bet that's the issue, I never was sure about remote control navigation working or not. (I've been avoiding a reboot to turn on LIRC all this time. Sounds lame, I know)

I'll start writing a installation guide for this, too.

[theophile]

Okay, I'll poke around some more. I use a keyboard for navigation.

[dols]

Okay, I'll poke around some more. I use a keyboard for navigation.

What key do you use for back on the keyboard? Escape?

I just tried my Windows Media Center remote out and the default LIRC config is mostly functional. The back button doesn't work though, probably a script problem

[theophile]

Okay, enabling mouse pointer worked. Keyboard arrow presses are still not recognized. I can select games and the buffering dialog makes it all the way to 100%, but playback never starts.

Also I can't select the login button. Could this be related?

[dols]

Okay, enabling mouse pointer worked. Keyboard arrow presses are still not recognized. I can select games and the buffering dialog makes it all the way to 100%, but playback never starts.

Also I can't select the login button. Could this be related?

The login button is disabled intentionally.

I added an install wiki page on the code.google site. It mentions the need for a video_cache specification in your ~/.mlb/config file.

If that doesn't help, maybe you can post a relevant part of your ~/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log so I can see what's happening. Also, your ~/.mlb/config, without the username/password, of course.

[theophile]

Okay, got it working. Looks great! Here are some things I've noticed:

• The "video_player" line in the user's config file needs to be "mplayer %s". My problem was that my player command already had the -dumpfile arguments and that was throwing the script off.
  
• I think it's buffering too long. Since seeking doesn't work very well anyway, I would think that no more than 3 seconds lead time would be enough.
  
• When playback is stopped with the "x" key, the background mplayer process continues to dump video onto the hard drive. The mplayer process should be stopped when playback stops.
  
• I'm currently using the Aeon skin and when I do, there is no indicator in the script what menu item is selected. It's like flying blind. It works OK in PM3.HD, tho.
  

[mrpaul1000]

Does it give a choice of games to watch . Thank you for the help and time everyone here .

[dols]

Okay, got it working. Looks great! Here are some things I've noticed:

• The "video_player" line in the user's config file needs to be "mplayer %s". My problem was that my player command already had the -dumpfile arguments and that was throwing the script off.

I'm thinking that this line will need to be used until XBMC development catches up with mplayer development:
video_player = mplayer -autosync 30 -fixed-vo -softvol -cache 8192 -really-quiet %s
and that things like this should be autoinstalled when this script is first ran.

I think it's buffering too long. Since seeking doesn't work very well anyway, I would think that no more than 3 seconds lead time would be enough.

What I found when I was testing is that the video would stop playing even after 30 seconds of buffering. The mplayer's that run in the background don't terminate correctly in this case. What I'm thinking is adding a kind of multiple-tuners interface like as if you had a multi-tuner card on your TV so that you could playback multiple games and you could control which ones were recording that way instead of having mplayer's run silently in the background using resources unnecessarily. I digress.
I still don't think that the flash video playback in XBMC is complete. There's that message in the log about AVC consuming the incorrect number of bytes, for instance. I wonder if mplayer can seek better with the saved .flv files better than XBMC, for instance.

When playback is stopped with the "x" key, the background mplayer process continues to dump video onto the hard drive. The mplayer process should be stopped when playback stops.

I'm currently using the Aeon skin and when I do, there is no indicator in the script what menu item is selected. It's like flying blind. It works OK in PM3.HD, tho.

I haven't tried any other skins so I'll have to try that out.
Thanks for the feedback!

[dols]

Does it give a choice of games to watch . Thank you for the help and time everyone here .

Yes, all games that are available with your MLB.TV subscription are viewable. If you live in Philadelphia, your Phillies will probably be unavailable because of MLB blackout rules.

[theophile]

I'm thinking that this line will need to be used until XBMC development catches up with mplayer development:
video_player = mplayer -autosync 30 -fixed-vo -softvol -cache 8192 -really-quiet %s
and that things like this should be autoinstalled when this script is first ran.

I agree, but I think that line should be hardcoded into the script, rather than trying to use the user's video_player line and appending flags to it. This is especially true if the user is using VLC or even the Applian FLV player via Wine (which the mlbviewer developer has done at times).

I still don't think that the flash video playback in XBMC is complete. There's that message in the log about AVC consuming the incorrect number of bytes, for instance. I wonder if mplayer can seek better with the saved .flv files better than XBMC, for instance.

XBMC actually seeks better than mplayer does. It keeps the audio and video in sync better too. The AVC consumption errors are not problems with XBMC. Rather, that's in the ffmpeg decoder. You are right, though, that the ffmpeg support for this particular form of encapsulation is far from complete.

As far as killing the mplayer process, this might be helpful:

http://objectmix.com/python/381913-kill-...cific.html

I am not a python coder, but I think a PID-specific approach would work and would be compatible with your plans for doing multiple streams simultaneously.

[dols]

version 0.5 is available at http://code.google.com/p/mlbtv-xbmc-plugin/
This version fixes navigation in the Top Plays display, the remote control back button, and adds colors when buttons are in focus, which makes the Aeon skin usable.

[dayglo]

version 0.5 is available at http://code.google.com/p/mlbtv-xbmc-plugin/
This version fixes navigation in the Top Plays display, the remote control back button, and adds colors when buttons are in focus, which makes the Aeon skin usable.

Anyone know how to install this easily? Like downloading a file and putting it in video section?

[dols]

Anyone know how to install this easily? Like downloading a file and putting it in video section?

If you don't follow the mlbviewer thread over at linuxquestions, I'll tell you that there is a lot to setup and install. The next release will contain some improvements to easily install some of these pieces.

Speaking of, I'm thinking of providing static binaries of mplayer and rtmpdump/flvstreamer in the package to reduce the amount of compile and setup time that users would have to go thru. There are going to be configurable paths to provide your own mplayer&rtmpdump locations. Anyway, let me know if you are not running on 32-bit linux.

[dols]

I agree, but I think that line should be hardcoded into the script, rather than trying to use the user's video_player line and appending flags to it. This is especially true if the user is using VLC or even the Applian FLV player via Wine (which the mlbviewer developer has done at times).

The next release will use a seperate config file for the GUI so that we won't step on the toes of the curses mlbviewer config.

XBMC actually seeks better than mplayer does. It keeps the audio and video in sync better too. The AVC consumption errors are not problems with XBMC. Rather, that's in the ffmpeg decoder. You are right, though, that the ffmpeg support for this particular form of encapsulation is far from complete.

I have found that fast-forwarding works most of the time while rewinding rewinds the video much faster than the audio rewinds.

As far as killing the mplayer process, this might be helpful:

http://objectmix.com/python/381913-kill-...cific.html

I am not a python coder, but I think a PID-specific approach would work and would be compatible with your plans for doing multiple streams simultaneously.

Yep, I'm looking at a fully daemonizing the mplayer processes. It'd be nice if python provided daemons as part of the standard library (In fact, there's PEP 3143 for this) I have it mostly working now except for some zombie processes that are hanging around.

[dayglo]

If you don't follow the mlbviewer thread over at linuxquestions, I'll tell you that there is a lot to setup and install. The next release will contain some improvements to easily install some of these pieces.

Speaking of, I'm thinking of providing static binaries of mplayer and rtmpdump/flvstreamer in the package to reduce the amount of compile and setup time that users would have to go thru. There are going to be configurable paths to provide your own mplayer&rtmpdump locations. Anyway, let me know if you are not running on 32-bit linux.

I am running a mac. is this only for the linux os?