Video Quality and a hint from the comments

Apparently if you’re using ffdshow, its negatively affecting playback frame rates within the mosaic. So, if you’re using it, please turn it off and you should see better frame rates. Thanks to rmcc4444 and mko for the hint!
Regarding Video quality for this evening – again, if you’re having trouble with the middle or high, please try the low quality on the mosaic stream. This should work identically to the single game streaming, though because we’re actually streaming 16 games at once, the quality will not look as good in the 6 game view. For the high quality streams, switch to the single game view.

Thanks,

Justin

Status for Tonights Games

Alright guys, we’ve put the mosaic back up, and have a new build available. Some of you have probably seen this and already been playing around.
Regarding the open issues discussed earlier:

-We fixed the CC popup window issue (just to confirm again – this is a secure connection, so no need to worry about putting your card in). If you’re still having trouble with this, please let us know.

-We believe we fixed the player tracker issue, though the player tracker problem was not within the mosaic – it was in the popup window on the site that lets you actually pick players. It taking some time to propagate the changed pages to all of our caches, so if you’re still having trouble with player tracker, it should be resolved by 5pm at the latest.

-We are still working on the high quality streaming, but have put them back in utilizing Swarmcast for tonights games for the time being. If you’re having trouble in the 6 or 4 game view getting video, please try the low quality setting, instead of the medium or high. Regarding feedback, I’d very much like to hear about your experiences on the medium or high streams – we’ve had reports of less than optimal behaviour. There should be no issues with either 400k or 700k single game streams though.

-Regarding open install issues, I’m posting up some instructions from our QA team here that should hopefully help you guys self-diagnose with video related issues. I’m going to put another install thread up, so those of you still having trouble installing can post there. Sorry for the delay getting through these – we want to get you all working and watching baseball on the mosaic while trying to work through the bigger open issues.

Thanks,

Justin

Changes Today

In preparation for todays changes that should address most of the issues we saw yesterday, we’re taking down the front end of the mosaic – it’ll announce itself as temporarily unavailable while we make some infrastructure changes behind the scenes. Don’t worry – it will be back well before game time today – we’d just rather not have you guys having sub-optimal experiences with it while we deploy our new code. Normally, this isnt required, and it won’t be a regular thing.
In the meantime, you can access MLB.TV Premium Archives on the Multimedia Guide in the browser here.

Thanks,

Justin

64-Bit Support

Hi All,

Just a quick note which may not have been clear. We don’t currently support 64 bit (vista or otherwise), only 32. We’ll be working on getting a 64 bit version working, but i dont have a specific timeline on it yet. We know many of you with higher end machines are moving to 64 bit, and appreciate the extra horsepower, and will address it asap.

Thanks,

Justin

Fixes for Tomorrow

Alright all of you, I know its been a frustrating day for many of you (it’s been for me as well, to say the least). That said, it’s also been nice to hear from those that have gotten things working and like the app. I’ve been off the air for a bit here as we work through problems and apologize for the lack of instant feedback. The whole team here takes this extremely personally (we’re all big baseball fans too), and want to provide the best service possible to you all.

Here’s where we are for tomorrow morning, regarding the major bugs discussed on the blog today:

-CC Verification Form popping up repeatedly / Not letting people into the application / Not displaying that it is secure: This will be resolved with a patch overnight, and will be fixed for tomorrows games.

-Playertracker issues: You should all expect that playertracker will be working great after another round of bugfixing overnight, and as soon as you see a new version available tomorrow (I’ll announce it here on the blog – probably around 1pm eastern in advance of the first games at 4pm).

-Streaming Issues/Quality: We’re working through the night on some fixes that should address the majority of the streaming issues that weren’t caused by our services provider today. I’m optimistic we’ll be back where we wanted to be starting before games tomorrow. If you’re struggling here, its worth note that the single game view in the mosaic has been working well all day, and is a pretty neat set of functionality with the stats alongside and additional data.

-Install Issues: After getting people the right installer, we’re making progress on this group. We know that some of you are still struggling with driver issues/software issues/etc., and want to address you all individually. I’ll put up another install thread here for those of you still having problems that our support team will be working through. Please post up your OS version and details about your machine with your post there.

Other notes:

-A few of you have asked about masking email addresses here, which i appreciate from a spam perspective, though I’ve offered mine up via the same posts to you all. I’m not sure about making that change, but can take a look into it once the mosaic is working great for you all – which is our first priority. I’ll ask respectfully that we try and keep the commentary here for all to see in an effort to encourage transparency and open discussion amongst the group about the product, but if you need to email, I’ll do my best to get back to you all quickly.

Thanks again for the support and patronage of the product. We appreciate all of your feedback and comments.

Best Regards,

Justin Shaffer

Credit Card Verification in the Mosaic

A number of people have expressed concern that the form in the mosaic is not secure on the blog, which is incorrect. The mosaic form submits data back to our servers using the same secure SSL technology that your browser uses. We’ll be providing additional notification to that on the form going forward.
We’re also working on the bug thats come up today for some of you thats causing the window to continue to reappear.

Thanks,

Justin

Streaming Update

All,
Again, thanks for your patience. Our streaming partner has been struggling to keep up with load all day on our single game streams, and we’ve been constrained by some similar issues with the mosaic streams. We appreciate your dedication and interest in the product, and will provide the optimal experience you expect. We’re working to resolve these issues and improve experience now.

For clarification, we’re offering single game streams in 400k and 700k to our premium subscribers this year. The 700k single game stream on monitors up to 36″ or so looks comparable to standard definition television – hence the TV quality streaming. For the Mosaic, the 6 game view is designed to allow you to get better context about whats going on around the league. In order to provide the customizable user interface, we actually have to stream all 16 games behind the scenes – so while the mosaic streams run at 700kilobits/s, 1.2megabit/second and 1.8 megabits/second, we’re actually streaming 16 games with video and audio in that pipe. We’re working on additional upgrades to our encoders to provide higher quality and will be rolling that out asap.

All that said, we’ve now deployed for those of you struggling with the mosaic streams, a 700k (LOW) quality stream in all video quality settings, that bypasses our new streaming software and should be working. We’ll have the high quality streaming back up and running asap. Thanks again for your understanding and all of the feedback. The whole team very much appreciates it.

Thanks,

Justin

Installation Issues

UPDATE: For those of you having the setup initialization failed error,it appears to be due to a bad file cached on our Akamai CDN. We’ve had them clear it out, and they should have the correct file cached now to serve to you. Please remove the first setup.exe app you downloaded, and download another from the Mosaic page here

Hi all,

For those of you still having trouble getting Mosaic installed who are on the blog, <b>please post a reply here with the issues you’re having (and ideally, with the OS / version / and basic machine config)</b>, and we’ll be addressing the issues immediately and getting in touch with some of you to follow-up. Most of you we should be able to resolve today, to the extent that we have any issues with the installer that havent shown up in our testing that we can identify this afternoon, we’ll be rolling a fix for late tonight/early tomorrow morning which should address the remainder of the problems. Again, thanks for your patience and patronage.

Thanks,

Justin

 

Playertracker Issue

Some of you have written in regarding issues with the Player Tracker. We’re aware of the bugs and appreciate the comments. We’ll have a fix out that resolves this before tomorrow’s games, at the latest.

Thanks,

Justin

Mosaic Video Quality / Streaming Issues

UPDATE 2:20 PM ET: Hi all, it looks as though the streaming issues experienced earlier are smoothing out. We’re still very interested to hear from those of you that are having streaming trouble/rebuffering actively within the mosaic, so if you have the time, please comment here. Thank you again for your understanding.

Best,

Justin