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Monday, March 31, 2008

Tech: Gameday, Gameday Audio Both Break On Linux

Opening Day, and not even Gameday works on Linux. As seems to be usual with the idiots at MLBAM, they chose Opening Day to launch a new, crappier, larger version of Gameday — and this time, it claims to be incompatible with the version of Flash I'm running (9.0.45, in case anybody cares). Gameday Audio, which had been working all through spring training, is now completely broken. Gameday itself takes up a full page.

Ah, spring.

Update: No surprises here:

Automatic flash installer detection does not work properly on Firefox / Mac versions 2.0.0.7 through 2.0.0.12. Updating the browser to 2.0.0.13 fixes the issue. Click here to update. We are investigating fixes on our end.
In my experience, if Mac is busted, Linux will be too. And hardly anybody ever tests with Mac before launching products. You'd think these guys would, given their user base.

Update 2: Updating to Flash 9.0.115 doesn't make Gameday work any better (and certainly doesn't make it any smaller). Home page site loads for both Angels and Dodgers (Dodgers particularly so for some reason) are extremely bad.

Update 3: Apparently I had to wait 2-3 minutes for Gameday to finish loading. Good grief.

Update 4: It looks like they're pushing Silverlight now, which is likely causing a lot of the problems. Miguel de Icaza, a self-described hopeless romantic, somehow thinks Microsoft will love him back. He's a fool; Microsoft hates Linux. This year may be the beginning of the end for Gameday Audio (and everything else) working properly under Linux. I wonder how much money changed hands to make Silverlight the next-gen guts of MLBAM.

Update 5: Looks like Gameday 2006 (the last good, small version) no longer works with the new XML structure. (I mentioned this in today's DT gameday thread, but didn't say anything about it here.)

I tried Foxpaw's suggestion of disabling Adblock Plus, but this just allowed ads to be displayed while doing nothing about Gameday Audio.

Update 6: I'm not the only one having problems.

Update 7: There also appears to be some provisions for allowing users to choose the old Mediaplayer (see for instance this "unsupported" banner that never displays under Linux), but they don't work so far on Linux+Firefox.

Update 5/1: This is now working, and I suspect the reason is because MLBAM pulled the plug on certain maldesigns.

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Comments:
Gameday Audio is not working in windows xp either... using IE 7...

maybe site traffic is to blame... its been working in spring training...

gameday does work for me
 
I think the Gameday Audio problem was a traffic thing. It seems to have gotten better.

I'm on a windows box, so Gameday is working, it's really is too tall, and I'm at 1024x768. That said, the information is generally better presented than v2007. They just need to ensmallen it a bit.

And yeah, v2006 is totally hosed.

(DXMachina)
 
i think my problem with Gameday Audio has to do with silverlight...

i could not get that working on my work machine in spring training...
 
There is also a problem with Gameday Audio/Video and AdBlock Plus. If you're using ABP you need to disable it for mlb.mlb.com to get either audio or video to work.
 
I finally downloaded Silverlight and that helped the MLB thing on my mac. Of course I missed the entire opening day game. Dammit just 161 left. But still I was really looking forward to that. Think I can get a credit by complaining?
 
Not so much. Non-Windows users will be an afterthought until the viruses/Windows OS's get so bad that a sizeable minority use something else.
 
just FYI, I uninstalled Silverlight on my system, and was able to get Gameday Audio to work...

The page detected I didnt have SL installed, so it offered to play the stream the "old" way, through Windows Media Player...
 
Interesting. I just tried using User Agent Switcher to change to IE7, to no avail.
 
Even on Vista/XP the Silverlight-based MLB.TV is a hackfest. I felt lucky if I got 5 minutes out of it without it freezing. Good thing I figured out it was on ESPN.
 
I created a greasemonkey script that helps some of the problems with gameday audio. It finds the url for the audio stream and opens it in a new window. You can find it at userscripts.org if you search for "mlb on linux".
 
What should I do with this script?
 
christer,

Your greasemonkey script works great!
It creates a new window using mplayer
and I can listen to Gameday Audio

Thanks,

kidormb
 
To those who may not know, you can still use Gameday 2007. You can manipulate the URL to get a particular game, but it is of this form:

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/gameday/y2007/gd.html?2008_04_05_nynmlb_atlmlb_1
 

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