UPDATE: Release Notes

Hi all.. for those of you having Address verification issues, we rolled out a change this evening that should resolve the problems you’ve been seeing and will no longer ask you to launch mlb.tv. Please just put your address and credit card into the popup form and hit ok – we’ll take the submission and cache the information securely so you won’t need to enter it again. We use this information to ensure that you’re properly blacked out based on your location, if we’re unable to utilize other methods to determine where you are. Again, thanks for your patience and looking forward to feedback here.
Update: Thanks to feedback from a number of you, we’ve rolled out some additional changes and believe this to be functioning properly now. Please write in if you’re still experiencing issues with address verification after today.

Thanks,

Justin

Panel 2 Video Quality

As previously mentioned, we’re upping the video quality on Panel 2 for a little while to gauge response. It may cause some of your systems to buffer more than in the past. It will be running at approx. 700kbps for video and 96kbps for audio for a total of 796 kbps for the evening. Email in and let us know how it works for you!
Thanks,

Justin

Feedback Format

The guys over at Strongspace wrote a great little posting on support tickets. For those of you sending in feedback – the commentary below might be helpful! (Here’s the original: http://weblog.strongspace.com/tips-and-tricks/how-to-write-the-perfect-support-ticket )
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Thanks to everyone who has sent in feedback and bug reports. Every single one helps us to improve the service we provide. The most helpful reports are detailed and succinct descriptions of what you’re experiencing.

Here’s a less than helpful report:

Subject: Help!
This thing doesn’t work! I don’t see anything!

Here’s a report that makes it a little easier for us to track down the issue:

Subject: Inconsistent MLB.TV Mosaic Blackout
Hello. I’m having trouble viewing the Yankees game in the Mosaic. When I log in to the Mosaic as “user@website.mlb.com” I see a blackout window shade over the Yankees game. However, if I log into the website with the same user, I can watch the game.

If it helps, I have a 2 Ghz Pentium with 512 MB RAM and I’ve installed Direct X 9.0c and .NET framework 1.1.

I can watch any other games so I suspect the application is fine, but I’d really like to see my team in all of its Mosaic goodness.

Comments

Thank you all for all of the comments on the blog so far. Due to the speed of your responses, i think its going to be a bit easier to consolidate all of this via email. Please continue to send feedback to mosaic@website.mlb.com, and the team and I (in addition to our CS team) will be reviewing your notes. I’ll post some of them up here, when they are issues that have been brought up by the group, as opposed to responding individually.
Thanks,

Justin

Where is the Mac Version?

Many of you have written in asking about the Mac Version! We appreciate all of the feedback, and want you to know that we haven’t forgotten about you (in fact, many of us here are mac users as well). The Mac version is currently under active development, and as soon as an early access beta is available, we’ll be notifying you here and via email for those that have expressed interest. In the meantime, thank you for the support.

Installer Questions

Here’s a quick update on the install process for some of you that have asked questions about it. The MLB.TV Mosaic uses the latest in video technology to overlay the user interface on top of the mosaic video and present the application as you see it. In order to ensure that your machine will be compatible, we perform some tests during the installation process so that once installed, it should work on your machine.
If you see errors such as “Unable to create VMR”, it can mean two things. First, and most common, you might need to upgrade your video card drivers to the latest version. You can generally find drivers from either your computer manufacturer (ex. Dell, Gateway, Lenovo, etc.) or from the specific manufacturer of your video card (ex. ATI, NVidia, etc.). Specifically, we require support for DirectX 9.0c, so when you check with them you can use that as a benchmark.

For those of you who have upgraded your video card drivers, and are still not able to get the installer to run – please write in to mosaic@website.mlb.com or comment here and we’ll take another look at specific issues. However, the solution in this case is largely going to be you may need to purchase a newer video card to get the mosaic to work. We’re continuing to work on optimising the application, and hopefully in the future will be able to offer a version that is less resource intensive.

Thanks,

Justin

Multiple Login Issues

A number of you have written in reporting issues with the Mosaic or the MLB.com site reporting that your account has been logged in too many times after using the Mosaic. We’ve added some additional functionality in our release this evening that we believe should resolve a number of these issues that have been reported. Once you’ve received the update, we’d appreciate feedback from you all as to whether or not this resolved your specific issues.

Address Verification Issues

A limited number of you have reported issues with Address Verification, and we’ve asked some of you to check back soon for updates. We’ve pushed a few changes in the past few days on this front which we believe to have resolved some of the problems seen. In addition, we’ll be adding an additional credit card verification screen for location confirmation (much like MLB.TV) to the Mosaic application in the next day or so. Once this is complete, we believe that all of these issues should be resolved. Thank you very much for you patience.