MLB.TV
Apr 05, 2008
MLB.TV Silverlight Player leaves Linux Users in the Dark
Microsoft Searchlight vs. mlbviewer

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

