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theophile · 2011-02-18, 21:59

I grabbed the Boxee app and the directory structure looks similar to XBMC addons. I don't know what the differences are, but I suspect that if I just throw it in by XBMC addon folder, it isn't going to fire right up.

It is my understanding that ffmpeg currently has everything necessary to directly access and play streams from MLB.TV. That should mean that the XBMC player can do so as well. In years past, one of the big challenges was using tools like rtmpdump to get the media stream to a local player, so that may not be necessary anymore. As the season starts and the mlbviewer project gets caught up, I'll start trying to get XBMC to play streams directly. Assuming that works, someone would need to figure out how to put the essential components of mlbviewer into a plugin and pair it with a GUI.

This plugin was a good start:

http://code.google.com/p/mlbtv-xbmc-plugin/

It had a functional GUI, but it relied on mlbviewer as an external dependency. If I knew anything about python, I'd already be working on it.

rbrohman · 2011-02-19, 02:28

If someone started a donation fund, I would definitely pitch in to buy a dev an mlb.tv account, if there was a reasonable chance of getting this plugin working for this season. Live sports is the only thing I miss from cable.

luger · 2011-02-19, 04:44

I second that. I'd definitely contribute a donation towards it.

blm14 · 2011-03-13, 03:13

I am watching MLB through the UPnP server PlayOn. It has to run in windows, which is a downside, but the upshot is that because it's windows you can install the nextDEF plugin which means I can watch in 720P streaming. Smile

dan1son · 2011-03-13, 04:25

blm14 Wrote:I am watching MLB through the UPnP server PlayOn. It has to run in windows, which is a downside, but the upshot is that because it's windows you can install the nextDEF plugin which means I can watch in 720P streaming.

The boxee app supports 720p streaming (same as the highest nexdev) even on Linux. They get direct access to the feeds so they don't go through any Flash nonsense. They're quite nice really. Hard to tell they're not from OTA.

theophile · 2011-03-14, 19:52

dan1son Wrote:The boxee app supports 720p streaming (same as the highest nexdev) even on Linux. They get direct access to the feeds so they don't go through any Flash nonsense. They're quite nice really. Hard to tell they're not from OTA.

I was wondering about this. I wonder whether the Boxee app can be ported. It looks like a similar structure to XBMC plugins.

theophile · 2011-03-14, 21:34

dan1son Wrote:The boxee app supports 720p streaming (same as the highest nexdev) even on Linux. They get direct access to the feeds so they don't go through any Flash nonsense. They're quite nice really. Hard to tell they're not from OTA.

Why do you think the Boxee app does not use Flash? Upon closer inspection (of version 2.55 of the Boxee app) it looks like it does indeed use Flash. There is a Boxee server-side script that handles the game calendar, each object being a hyperlink to the flash object for that game. The app parses that script, gets the url for the selected game, then passes it to bxflashplayer. At least as far as I can tell.

The only reference to rtmp is an alternate means of getting radio (audio only) feed.

dan1son · 2011-03-14, 22:22

theophile Wrote:Why do you think the Boxee app does not use Flash? Upon closer inspection (of version 2.55 of the Boxee app) it looks like it does indeed use Flash. There is a Boxee server-side script that handles the game calendar, each object being a hyperlink to the flash object for that game. The app parses that script, gets the url for the selected game, then passes it to bxflashplayer. At least as far as I can tell.

The only reference to rtmp is an alternate means of getting radio (audio only) feed.

Not from my experience. If you startup a game and hit the diag screen, it's playing back with VDPAU and not flash. At least last year...

I haven't looked at the source though... but from in app experience from last year, that's how it worked. I haven't tried this year. Wasn't sure if the spring training games were available. I can give it a go tonight.

theophile · 2011-03-14, 22:36

dan1son Wrote:Not from my experience. If you startup a game and hit the diag screen, it's playing back with VDPAU and not flash. At least last year...

I haven't looked at the source though... but from in app experience from last year, that's how it worked. I haven't tried this year. Wasn't sure if the spring training games were available. I can give it a go tonight.

Interesting. I may be working from an old copy of the plugin. I'll update it tonight and see if anything changes.

As a side note, I would think Boxee would want to use the flash player for this, since MLB.TV has some feature-rich overlay content in their web player. It's also a lot easier to maintain. For example, mlbviewer has a great deal of code devoted to stream selection, but the Boxee app appears to have none (since the flash player normally handles that).

dan1son · 2011-03-14, 23:36

theophile Wrote:Interesting. I may be working from an old copy of the plugin. I'll update it tonight and see if anything changes.

As a side note, I would think Boxee would want to use the flash player for this, since MLB.TV has some feature-rich overlay content in their web player. It's also a lot easier to maintain. For example, mlbviewer has a great deal of code devoted to stream selection, but the Boxee app appears to have none (since the flash player normally handles that).

I disagree completely. Flash as a container for video files is junk. Especially with overlayed information. I want the video stream playing with a native player using hardware decoding for efficiency and the lack of random overlay information. It wasn't even until flash 10.2 that it was capable of actually doing hardware decoding and screen display all in the GPU on supported hardware, and that only happens if the player is coded to support it (which I somehow doubt mlb is).

Their website does have some pretty feature rich overlay stuff, but you need a mouse to pop it up and use it. I don't have a mouse on my HTPC, nor do I want to use one for a sit back experience.

blm14 · 2011-03-15, 04:14

^ just FYI I'm pretty sure that I am getting the 720P streams through PlayOn. It looks REALLY crisp and I have the NextDef plugin installed on the windows machine...

theophile · 2011-03-15, 06:11

dan1son Wrote:I disagree completely. Flash as a container for video files is junk. Especially with overlayed information. I want the video stream playing with a native player using hardware decoding for efficiency and the lack of random overlay information. It wasn't even until flash 10.2 that it was capable of actually doing hardware decoding and screen display all in the GPU on supported hardware, and that only happens if the player is coded to support it (which I somehow doubt mlb is).

Their website does have some pretty feature rich overlay stuff, but you need a mouse to pop it up and use it. I don't have a mouse on my HTPC, nor do I want to use one for a sit back experience.

No, I'm with you. I'd much prefer the direct rtmp stream in all its VDPAU glory. I'm just saying that since Boxee already has a Flash-capable player, I'd think they'd want to use the Flash-based MLB.TV content because it's easier to write for and it allows them to bill all the features MLB.TV offers.

At any rate, I did play around with it and Boxee is indeed grabbing the stream directly. There's another guy on this forum who is working on an mc module for XBMC, which would make it much easier to port the Boxee app to XBMC. I also played around with using mlbviewer to construct an XBMC-compliant .strm file and got that working, but only for live games at the moment.

So there are two viable avenues for getting a working plugin. One is porting the Boxee app, assuming we do get an mc module for XBMC. The other is getting mlbviewer to a point where it can directly launch games in XBMC. If I can do that, we'd just need someone to package that up as an addon and include a GUI. I'm going to try to get in touch with the guy that wrote the first plugin a couple years ago and see if he might be willing to do that.

dan1son · 2011-03-15, 22:25

theophile Wrote:No, I'm with you. I'd much prefer the direct rtmp stream in all its VDPAU glory. I'm just saying that since Boxee already has a Flash-capable player, I'd think they'd want to use the Flash-based MLB.TV content because it's easier to write for and it allows them to bill all the features MLB.TV offers.

Fortunately I think boxee knows the flash based content is the less preferred option under all circumstances. All of their plugins that can use straight streams do, which is nice.

I'm all for mlb in XBMC in any regard. I'd rather have a crappy standard plugin interface with no live scores/stats/etc. than having to switch to boxee just for MLB like I did last year. My wife didn't appreciate it when I forgot to put the system back to XBMC Smile

.

speed32219 · 2011-06-14, 17:34

First off, great plugin, I watched a live game as was very impressed with the video content. I also noticed that my cpu stats where under 10% usage which means vdpau or flash acceleration. I watch flash videos in 720P without any problem, and they look great on HDTV. (Including 120" projection)

I prefer flash mainly because I can watch it on ALL of my media. (Android tablet, Iphone, MS, and most importantly LINUX based devices!) rather than MS with multiple programs supporting the feeds.

I take my phone with me and stream music and or video on the fly (mpeg2, wav, flac, lossless, etc. converted to flash) from my home system. And I beleive as adobe moves along, flash is getting better (Just like xbmc) and is supported on more devices than anything currently.

ppl do not understand that raw feeds take a tremendous amount of BW espically HD, and bandwidth (Backbone) is limited not unlimited. That's why there is compression of data streams including Voice using codecs, to save BW on the backbones.

FYI: VP6, VP6-E, VP6-S, VP7, VP8: Proprietary high definition video compression formats and codecs developed by On2 Technologies used in platforms such as Adobe Flash Player 8 and above, Adobe Flash Lite, Java FX and other mobile and desktop video platforms. Supports resolution up to 720p and 1080p. VP8 has been made open source by Google under the name libvpx or VP8 codec library.

Sorry for the rant, I like your live MLB streams, I think you've done a great job. Keep up the good work!