mlb gameday audio on linux

well, the free baseball audio i used to use doesn't seem to work anymore, so i've been looking for ways to use the mlb gameday audio service. the problem is, they assume i want to spend the whole day sitting in front of my windoze machine listening to my web browser. so i found the excellent mlbviewer project. the dependencies were mostly easy to resolve: pyxml and simplejson have gentoo packages, and suds just needed an easy_install suds. rtmpdump, however, has been declared an enemy to truth, justice, and the american way. almost every site that once hosted a copy seems to have taken it down after getting peed on by adobe's legal department. (fritz hollings, still keeping the country safe from technology.) i had to get a copy of rtmpdump-v1.5 from a bsd repo, since mlbviewer claims not to work on newer versions (although i seem to recall seeing a changelog entry noting that 1.6 would...). i had to add an include for stdint.h in rtmppacket.h to get it to compile on linux. make rtmpdump, make streams worked fine after that. don't forget to run Patch.sh in rtmpdump-patches/ that comes with mlbviewer. it also needs a very recent svn version of mplayer; the install file shows you how to check it out. ./configure --enable-dynamic-plugins, make, and you're done. i built mlbviewer-0.1alpha12 in its own directory, with a dedicated rtmpdump and mplayer. the install file says to install these to root, so they are found by mlbviewer. but it turns out mplayer and rtmpdump_x86 are only referenced once in the whole mlbviewer package (other than test/), so it's not hard to change the paths. set PYTHONPATH if you don't install to root python setup.py --prefix=/path/to/mlbviewer/installation install mkdir ~/.mlb cp MediaService.* ~/.mlb/ set user and pass in ~/.mlb/config i think that the -dumpstream -dumpfile options will work with the mplayer called from mlbviewer, so this could be a nice little audio tivo for yours truly. and mlbviewer comes with other handy tools for finding out which files are available, for some easy cron automation.

EDIT: managed to compile rtmpdump 2.2b, which claims to support everything (including rtmpe). had to point it to some includes with

export XCFLAGS='-I/home/epd-6.0.1-rh5-x86/include'

export XLDFLAGS='-L/home/epd-6.0.1-rh5-x86/lib'

seems to work just fine with mlbviewer, even without any of its patches for 1.5. mlbplayer warns that you must compile a svn version from the last 2 weeks (before its release 2009-06-11) for it to play stably. ubuntu's current version (2:1.0~rc3+svn20090426-1ubuntu10.1, SVN-r29237-4.4.1) of mplayer plays the flv (with a mp3 extension!?) file dumped out by test/gamedayaudio.py, though it does get the length wrong which might cause problems with seeking. otherwise, maybe the warnings apply more for video than audio.