Linux

    One world, one dream?  Really?  Well, as long as you use proprietary software.  When Microsoft signed an exclusive deal in January to broadcast the 2008 Olympics online with their partner network NBC, Linux users knew they wouldn't be invited to the party.  nbcolympics.com uses Microsoft's Searchlight which doesn't and will never have a GNU/Linux port.  Web adoption of proprietary standards like those used in MS Searchlight continue to endanger the openness of the world wide web and hinder those using free software.  We can only hope that the open source community will pull together, share ideas, and conceive a workaround before the live streams are gone forever. 

There is a good reason to believe that God smiled on the day mlb.tv was created. To be able to catch every game played from every team all season long has simply become the best $90 annual investment in my life. However this year's switch from the traditional Macromedia player to Microsoft's Silverlight player has been nothing short of disappointing. The Silverlight video is choppy, does not load full-screen, and the video will only load in Ubuntu with a non-eloquent hack. Come on MLB, the support thread is getting quite long.  Leave it up to the linux community to fend for itself.  Developers from the thread have created a python script called mlbviewer 0.18 that requires the simplejson python module installed.  With mlbviewer you can pull in game schedules, live games, archives, or top plays all while launching the streams externally in mplayer or xine.

    Requires Python
    Download http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simplejson/
        python ez_setup.py
        python setup.py build
        python setup.py install
    Download http://sourceforge.net/projects/mlbviewer
       for local use - python mlbviewer.py
       for system install - python setup.py install