OT: mlb, nfl and related audio access issues

[Cheryl Homiak]

This is Ot because it deals with Orca access and I did post it to the orca 
list but I thought it might be helpful either to people on this list not 
subscribbed to the orca list but using orca or to people experimenting 
with command line usage for sports or for other audio that doesn't seem to 
be working with mplayer.

>From chomiak at charter.net Thu Jan 22 12:28:27 2009
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:28:22 -0600 (CST)
From: Cheryl Homiak <chomiak at charter.net>
To: orca-list at gnome.org
Subject: Exciting news about mlb and nfl and related access


Last year I couldn't access mlb games with iceweasel or firefox and for 
nfl gootball I could access windows media links but not not realplayer 
links; this was a real pain for the first several weeks of the season as 
by some glitch only realplayer links were working for home teams. I solved 
the mlb problem last year by using a program called mlbviewer on the 
command line; this works great!!! In fact, I even tried it today and was 
able to arrow back to the Word Series games for last year or, better yet, 
use the j key to enter a date.

However, today I saw a post on the debian-powerpc list about somebody 
tryinjg to access realplayer content. The primary answer given, for debian 
users, was to instal mplayer, mplayer-mozilla (which I didn't know 
existed) and then run a script

/usr/share/mplayer/scripts/binary_codecs.sh install

I added mplayer-mozilla and ran the script, which basically appears to add 
the ssentials codecs package which can also be downloaded from the mplayer 
website. Then I tried the realplayer links at nfl and they worked; i'm 
remembered on this computer and don't have to enter my login information 
so I can't tell you whether or not this will work if you aren't 
automatically logged in. Then, although mlb doesn't use realplayer links 
any longer, I thought that maybe the addition of the mplayer-mozilla 
package and/or more codecs might allow me to use the mlb website directly. 
Rather than going to www.mlb.com, which is more complicated as far as 
accessing the audio feeds, I used

http://mlb.com/mlb/homepage/narrowband.jsp

chose the multimedia link and went down to the games for the day, which of 
course are still the archives of the last World Series game from last 
year--but you could also open the calendar for other dates from last year. 
I hit enter on one of the archived links for the audio since i just have 
the gameday audio pass,  and I was presented with the login page. After 
entering my login information, much to my delight, I was taken to the game 
feed and it loaded and played. Of course there are no guarantees with mlg; 
mlb always seems to throw some kind of problematic change into their 
website each year, and they seem to wait to do it until you've payed for 
the season and spring training is over. However, at least at this point, 
it works with orca as described above. I thought I should share this 
information because I thought it might be helpful to those having problem 
either with these specific issues or with other sites whose audio content 
doesn't seem to work.

Hth.



-- 
Cheryl

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."