It’s Opening Day in baseball today, and I’m ready to freakin’ kill somebody. Preferably the person responsible for mlb.tv. I paid $80 to watch baseball games online, yet now I’m unable to since the cockchafers at mlb.tv decided to make it incompatible with Linux. This is a recent development. Not more than a few weeks ago, I was able to watch Spring Training games and the World Baseball Classic using a variety of multimedia plugins. Now, not so much.
As if adding insult to injury, mlb.tv also decided to flashify everything. It’s 2006, who the fuck uses flash? Flash is garbage. Flash has always been garbage. Flash makes the Internet unbearable. But it does allow for a little “Boss” button on the mlb.tv page. What is a “Boss” button, you might ask. Well, it’s a little button that you click on and the baseball game window changes into a fake Word document. What kind of Word document? A fake nomination letter to bestbossever.com That is–pardon the expression–gay.
This might come as a surprise to the nerds who code mlb.tv, but not everyone needs a “Boss” button. Not everyone sits in a cubicle all day, surfing the Internet and wanking it to celebrity nip slip sites. Some of us work in places where the only Internet access is the Starbucks next to the movie theater. And I would never watch a baseball game at a Starbucks. Starbucks people are not my people. I have no need for “Boss” buttons. All I want is to get what a paid $80 for, to get what I got from mlb.tv last year and last month.
Sadly, it seems that all media outlets seem more concerned with stopping piracy than providing content to honest customers. I might download music, video games and gigabyte upon gigabyte of Japanese gangbang porn, but that doesn’t make me a criminal. Yet Major League Baseball wants limit the ways I access content that I paid good money for. They also want to stop me from giving my own name to my own fantasy baseball team. I mean, who uses character count limits on a fantasy baseball team name? All I wanted was “The Sun Is Just Around The Corner” but instead, due to the character count fascists, I get stuck with TheSunIsJustAroundTheCorner. Lame. It’s almost enough to make me give up on corporate media entertainment altogether. But then I remember that I have a 37 second attention span. So I guess it’s back to sitting through unbearable load times in a $70 Xbox, Again? games and possibly even getting a cheap Mac, just so I can watch baseball games again.
In conclusion, Major League Baseball and mlb.tv can kiss my ass. I’m going to write them a strongly worded email, but I doubt it will have any effect. Also, in honour of the baseball season, I will not shave or cut my hair until my beloved Seattle Mariners win the World Series. Or until they are guaranteed to finish at .500. Or until either Ichiro!, Richie Sexson or Felix Hernandez get hurt. Regardless, I will be rather fuzzy for the summer. And the itchiness of my facial fuzz will be a constant reminder of what annoying bastards Major League Baseball are.
yet I hate Major League Baseball.
This message board thread seems to be addressing your MLB.tv problem.
link!
I meant this
I came across the same thread in a google search. Look at the dates: all the posts are from last month, when everything was working fine and dandy with mlb.tv and Linux. Mplayer-plugin was just one of the three different plugins I was able to use to watch the baseball games. The problem is that, in the last fortnight or so, mlb.tv has changed from easy media streams to requiring either Windows Media Player or Flash. As I stated in the post, flash is garbage under windows and even worse under Linux. MLB can continue to kiss my ass until further notice.
I was having problems with them as well. Then I go to buy my damn tickets to the damn Mets/Giants games this month and they charge a $7.70 “convenience fee,” which is then compounded by a “handling fee” of $3.50–unless you choose to print out your tickets yourself, which is an additional $2.50 on top of that. Printing them out yourself is more expensive than having them mailed at the Giants’ expense. Get it? Handle this convenience, you money-grubbing-steroid-pushin’ bastards.
Also, what’s a Pipibohrungen? I have a general idea, but maybe you could clarify, because I want to make sure your Jenny is the same one I met at a bar in St. Tropez one time.
According to the Google language tools, Pipibohrungen is a pee hole. Click the Jim J. Bullock square picture for more info. My Jenny would never hang out with you in bar.
Ordering tickets online is horseshit. At least for spring training games, the seat selection process was terrible. All I want to do is choose the row where I want to sit. I don’t want best available. I don’t want best available by section. I know I want the last row of a section between 205 and 211, so why can’t I buy that exact ticket online? If the airlines can manage easy and convenient seat selection, e-ticket and boarding pass printing online, why can’t MLB? I thought MLB was supposed to be on the cutting edge of the whole online technology thing.
Printing tickets is a waste. You’ll only lose them. Will call is the way to go. Also, what do you plan to throw at Barry Bonds? The San Diego fans set the bar pretty high with the syringe. That’s going to be a tough act to follow.
Will Call adds an extr a line to stand in. Sometimes this is OK, other times it isn’t. Printing tickets at home is awesome, except that 1) it is ridiculous that they charge extra for it and 2) you feel like a dink walking through the gate with an 8.5×11 piece of paper, having it scanned and then folding it up and sticking it into your pocket.
I hate being around people more than anybody, but I’m more than willing to stand in a short line to save money and guarantee that I won’t lose my tickets. Will call lines are rarely all that long and the time spent in one will be far, far less than the time spent being herded through the turnstiles and then waiting behind old people and/or just plain slow people as they slowly waddle their fat asses up the stairs and get to their seats, not to mention the time spent in line for concessions or waiting to get in or out of the parking lot. Waiting in a will call line is a small price to pay to avoid at least some of surcharges that the whores at Ticket Master and MLB thrust upon us helpless consumers.
If you can’t watch MLB even though you have paid for it, get even by posting your password so that others can watch for free!
Sorry, Mr. Marbles, I can’t provide my username/password, at least not yet. Apparently, it’s possible to get the audio from the video feed, so I’m going to mess with that this weekend. Also, my mlb.tv password is the same as the administrative password for this blog, so giving out free baseball would be like giving up control of this blog.
I got it working with Linux. Check here to see how I got it to work. Also has links to the forums that helped me fix the issue.
http://www.thomascochran.com/article/47/mlbtv-running-on-linux-with-firefox-and-mplayer
Thanks, I found this same solution on the Gentoo forums yesterday, and it works. I actually prefer the video launching in a separate window, as it allows me to close the browser without closing the game. Now if only I can get mozplugger to do the same thing, so I can use Opera instead of Seamonkey.
please change your password for mlb.tv or this blog.
REBEL!
I realize many people come to this blog via google searches for mlb.tv and password, but I simply cannot give out my mlb.tv password. I’ve actually got it working now, albeit only with the Gecko-based browsers. I’m not going to risk having my account shut down because a bunch of cheapskates are spreading my password around the net.
Wait, you got mlb.tv working on Linux? I have to restart my computer in windows in order to watch it. What did you do? There are lots of videos that the Linux codec I have doesn’t handle. Were you able to fix those?
Like I said, this only works with Firefox or Seamonkey. Think link tc211 provided earlier in this thread gives good instructions on how to get it to work.Basically, use mplayer-plugin and add noembed=1 to your mplayerplug-in.conf file, which should be in ~/.mplayer. This will open the video in a separate mplayer window. Apparently some sort of Flash garbage on the mlb.tv blocks embedded video, which is why you can sometimes get sound but no video when you try to use an embedded plugin. Also, you have to log in before you go to the mlb.tv page. Go to mlb.com, use the login link at the top, then go to the audio & video/mlb.tv link and choose your game. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, but it works. At least it works for me using Arch Linux. I don’t know what distro you use, so your results may vary.