MLB.TV for Channels

Playground Custom Channels
#473

set up hlstube (GitHub - jnewland/hlstube: Serve HLS streams generated with youtube-dl over HTTP. For, uh, personal use.)

next 5 weeks off games are already up on youtube (search mlb)

Create custom channel, and enter streams you have set up.
here are the next 5 weeks

EDIT: i have changed my port in docker to 8060, as MLB TV is using 8080

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="MLBYT1” channel-number="811” tvg-name="MLBYT1, Pirates at Cubs 18/5 7.30PM ET
http://localhost:8060/_/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qg1BWHGqQ8

#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="MLBYT2” channel-number="812” tvg-name="MLBYT2, Tigers at Twins 5/25 1PM ET
http://localhost:8060/_/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLeVB_jAqP8

#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="MLBYT3” channel-number="813” tvg-name="MLBYT3, Royals at Gaurdians 6/1 1PM ET
http://localhost:8060/_/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2u0zWDfgQQ

#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="MLBYT4” channel-number="814” tvg-name="MLBYT4, Blue Jays at Royals 6/8 2PM ET
http://localhost:8060/_/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW9kkthTqoM

#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="MLBYT5” channel-number="815” tvg-name="MLBYT5, Twins at Mariners 6/15 4PM ET
http://localhost:8060/_/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Z9hnn4QWw

#474

Im typically always a fan of "more free" so youtube and apple tv are a win for me but yeah. Its hard too, I am a cubs fan and a few years ago you could have a game on WGN, NBCSN Chicago, WCIU, and I think even Fox. When they switched to Marquee so many fans were upset despite almost every game now being on one channel. The big complaint was you had to subscribe to a cable package that actually carried the channel :-/

#475

Some observed odd behavior. I just sat down at 6pm to start watching today's 1pm game that was still recording because i extend all of my baseball recordings by about 3 hours. When i try to start watching the recording from the beginning, i sometimes get a black screen and a spinning circle which never goes away. The recording never starts. I've reported this previously and someone told me that it was probably my wifi signal, so i accepted that and moved on. The recording seemed to play later on when i tried. So today, since it was 5 hours after the game started, i thought that maybe the game's mlb.tv stream was over and perhaps was confusing Channels. I went to the web UI and manually stopped the recording, then the next time i tried to play the recording, it immediately worked! I wanted to report this to whoever is interested, and I'll try this same thing the next time this happens and let you know!
A second observation, is that the Playback Speed option that typically works for all recordings isn't working for this recording. Im using the test flight app and use get playback speed option all the time

2 Likes
#476

appe tv is only free for now.

#477

this is interesting in that I don't have any way to keep a recording going once the MLB stream stops. when their stream stops, it stops in channels too...if you're extending it by 3 hours, you're probably going to encounter this at some point unless every single game runs super long...

#478

I’ve lost the banners. Not the biggest of deals but from an asthetic point of view I’d like them back. I’ve tried reinstalling from image 1.8.3, etc. Anything I did wrong?

image
image1920×1440 164 KB

1 Like
#479

Have you tried force quitting the app on the apple tv or rebooting?

#480

I’ll try rebooting the apple tv when I get home. I had restarted the channels server, docker, etc without any luck.

#481

I tried all of that now. I tried restarting docker, I deleted the app from the apple TV and re-installed. I'm still not getting the banners up there just a black screen. Driving me nuts. On the server the icons are there just not on the apple TV it seems. When I records an MLB game, instead of a graphic for the recording it's just a black box. Everything else works fine but this is driving me a little nuts.

#482

I figured it out. My problem was that the port 8080 was being grabbed by a program on my computer. Fyi, tivo desktop, at least on my setup, uses 8080.

#483

will hopefully have a new version coming tomorrow with some minor changes (testing it now): added peacock as a national exclusive game, and added guide overflow blocks between games of a split doubleheader.

4 Likes
#484

just pushed 1.8.5. this has the fixes i described earlier and also took care of the missing games in the guide from when i added the national exclusivity messages (not sure if anyone had noticed, but those games were only showing up for home teams in the guide). this should bring them back for all teams.

also, i'm working on getting the radio feeds working as an option. i've made progress but they're not ready yet.

as always, let me know if you find any issues.

7 Likes
#485

This will be awesome!

4 Likes
#486

pushed 1.8.7 with a very minor change (guide day start now tracks midnight HAWAII time rather than midnight local time). will fix potential guide issues with the late games in the eastern and central time zones.

#487

english radio feeds are working. i have the mets game on FOX right now working with the mets radio booth.

i need a lot of help with this, though, because i'm not sure if every radio feed has a different designation. i'm probably going to throw this up as a separate tag and let everyone have at it with their favorite team and report any issues before i make an official release with it...will try to get this done before the end of the weekend.

there's also the question of: what is the best way to introduce these feeds into the guide? we can't have it select on the fly because of how channels works, so i see two options (if anyone else has any ideas, throw them at me)...

  1. selection when you create the container. downside here is that you get only TV or only radio, but not both.

  2. introduce multiple feeds for each team...i.e. each team gets two channels, one for TV and one for radio. <--- this is the way i'm leaning right now, but it has the potential for a lot of clutter. need to make sure not to overdo it here. the downside here is that for national games, only the home radio feed is available (i will see if i can get the away feed up at some point, but the actual streams from MLB only have the home feed available for overlay...so that'll need a lot more digging to see if i can get it working). this is of course only an issue with the FOX regional games, at least here in the US...but it's still a potential issue.

i'm open to ideas.

edit: this might take a little bit longer, as there seems to be a bug in channels with how it handles the alternate audio. tivimate is giving me the radio feeds (as it should, since i have those set to default in the m3u8 that is being generated), but channels is still always loading the default audio.

@tmm1 @maddox any ideas?

2 Likes
#488

Having to define one or the other when creating the container doesn't seem like a good option. I certainly wouldn't want to be locked into a particular feed for a team or teams.

With that said, I'm not sure there is any way around the multiple guide entries. Could it be setup to appear like subchannels? For example, Braves TV channel is 2000 and radio feed is 2000.1? Or TV is 2000.1 and radio is 2000.2?

I'm definitely glad to hear that this is close!

2 Likes
#489

sub-channels are a good idea! that certainly seems to be a reasonable way to go.

also, i think i figured out a way to overlay road team audio on the fox regional games (rather than just the home radio feed)...but i won't have any way to test it until next weekend.

that being said, i still need to hear back from the channels devs as to why it's ignoring my alternate audio feed...without that, i'll have to do some more tinkering to try to get this working (but i'm hesitant since the m3u8 is clearly valid, it's working perfectly in tivimate).

1 Like
#490

so, here's an update: some bad news.

until the devs get back to me with a potential solution, this is pretty much dead in the water. no matter what i do, it is always playing the main audio feed and ignoring my alternate audio (which is the radio feed). i don't have a way to strip the default audio from the main video feed, so without channels respecting the alternate audio, we're out of luck here. this seems to be an issue that needs to be fixed with how channels handles alternate audio for custom channels before it will work.

1 Like
#491

Option 2 if it can be worked out would be the better way to handle this IMO.
Thanks for pursuing this!

#492

if worse comes to worse, I'll still put this out as a separate image so people can use it to create a separate container and run it in something like tivimate or Kodi (both of them are tested and working) if we can't get it working in channels...but I (like everyone else here I'm sure) hope we can figure this out. still need one of the devs to see this thread and hopefully have an answer (or a quick fix on their end).

1 Like