Aren’t they only blacked out when they’re actually playing in your area, though?
No. Local RSNs have exclusive broadcast rights to any households within their viewing area, regardless of whether the team is playing at home or on the road. Their games are shown locally on Bally Sports stations (which do not integrate with Channels) but blacked-out on MLB TV.
interesting...I'll take a look. it's possible the guide fix I put in for 1.6.1 broke the ability to leave teams out of the list. I have always run it with all 30 teams so that I can easily see the schedule on any given day, so if that broke something I would have missed it.
Thanks for all the effort you’re putting in to get this working. Any chance you could build the container for ARM? I know Apple silicon and RPi folks would certainly benefit.
Docker on Apple silicon runs the container using QEMU, which consumes quite a bit more resources. Would be nice to have it run natively. If you can throw it up on Git, I would be willing to help.
There is a slight difference (audio sync) on the MLB app in the radio audio feed(s) and the TV feed(s). Are you hoping to compensate for that?
This has been working great. One thing has me confused, and it relates to games that have the pre-game show on MLB.tv.
For example, right now if I tune into MLB.tv I can see that the NESN pre-game show is playing ahead of this afternoon's Red Sox game. If I go to my BOS channel in Channels, it shows the usual "this stream is currently Off-Air" message. However, if I go to the M3U link from the channels-baseball container and use the http://192.168.1.18:8080/playlist/BOS link in VLC, it's showing the NESN pregame show. Am I supposed to be able to watch the pregame shows through Channels? How is it showing it using the URL that's provided in the M3U link, but Channels is showing me the "off air" message? I did manually reload the M3U and XMLTV data in Channels for the baseball source, figuring that may have something to do with it, but it still shows the off-air message on the BOS channel in Channels after that.
Thanks
sort of...i'm trying to emulate the way the roku app works, where it can just switch back and forth between radio/tv. you'll have to make the choice when you launch the container i think due to the way channels works, but it should be sync'ed up if i can get it to work the way i want.
it depends when you load the stream and whether or not the API reports it as being "on" at that point. some networks include the pre/post in the mlb tv stream, others don't. it's all about when the API says the stream is "online" (and whether or not that includes the pre/post)...i have no other way of knowing if the stream is active other than trusting what the API tells me.
once you load it the first time in a client, it is cached for a certain amount of time...if the game hasn't started yet, you'll get the "off air" message and then it won't check again until 10 minutes before first pitch, to avoid hammering MLB servers repeatedly trying to load a stream that isn't online yet.
once you load a game while the stream is online, it's cached until the end of the game or for six hours, whichever comes first.
my guess here is that the stream came "online" according to the API in the time between when you loaded it in channels and when you loaded it in VLC. if you go to channels and try to load a game that isn't online yet, then a minute later open VLC (and in that minute that has passed the stream has now come online), you'd see the behavior you're seeing. channels isn't checking again to see if the stream is active because it has already cached that it's not active, so it won't check it again until 10 minutes before the scheduled first pitch. your VLC stream is a different client, so it has a different session and has cached that the stream is active, so you're seeing the pre-game there.
Ah, thanks so much for this explanation. Now that I see how you've got it working, the behavior makes sense. It sounds like MLB does not give you information on offline vs. pregame to work with, it's just either offline or game started.
correct. the only thing I can see is whether or not the stream is online...pre game and post game isn't broken out. it's just either on or off.
I do think there are some tweaks that can be made here to make this a bit more efficient now that a lot of networks are including the pre and post game stuff, so I'll do some tinkering and see if I can make this part a little better.
Thanks again! It would be nice, but obviously not a huge deal.
Looking at the schedule for today the morning double header game for the D-Backs/Nationals did not appear in the guide
It did for me, no issues at all
make sure you have it set to update the guide often. i have mine set to update every hour - MLB is very quick with updating their metadata when a game is PPD.
with the mets playing a DH right now and several scheduled throughout the year due to the late start to the season, a reminder: if it's a straight doubleheader, you need to close out of the first game, load the channel again to let it clear the stream, then load it again once the second game starts.
i'm working on a way to make this more efficient (and that second of the three channel loads won't always be necessary), but doing it that way should always work, for now.
I recorded today's mets DH using an advanced team pass that i setup. It's been working great for every game! For today's DH, the first game recorded as expected. However, since i always pad my recordings by 240 minutes, the second game was recorded as well. I wasnt sure if this would work, but it did. However, i noticed a second recording from today too. It started recording at a random time of 8:48pm. Since the first game started at 3:10pm, i assume the second game started sometime around 7pm, so I'm wondering what the 8:48 recording start time is doing? I didn't play that recording, because i don't want the second game spoiled
that's interesting. i'm not at all sure how that worked, considering each game is a different media id from MLB's end (including both games of a DH)...
ah, wait, you didn't watch the second game yet? i'd be willing to bet both the padding on the first recording is empty. the second recording at 8:48 might be the end of the second game, if it stopped and re-started channels...but if i had to guess i'd say it's probably the off-air stream that was recorded there (because it probably needed a "reload" like i mentioned above).
If you're interested, the first game recording started at 3:10pm, and ended at 220 minutes on the recording timeline. The regular "MLB.tv Thank you for watching" screen is there until 222 minutes. Then suddenly the timeline skips up 255 minutes on its own, and the screen changed to "MLB.tv The event will begin shortly" and remains there until the 329th minute where the stream resumes just in time before the top of the first inning begins. The timeline ended at 360 minutes but the game actually kept playing, but i cannot skip forward anymore. Did i max out the length of a recording in Channels?!
definitely interested, i'll have to play around with this myself and see how channels handles it. might give me some insights on how to handle inbetween games of a DH a little more efficiently.
Just a heads up but it does look like they’ve started doing the MLB Big Inning channel again. I was able to watch it last night under the featured section of the mlb app. Looks like its nightly now starting at 9pm et. Would be great to have that stream added to the app. Thanks for all you do! Really love this add on.