For today’s Giants-Phillies NLCS game 6, I’m using the same setup as described in my earlier post. It’s working moderately well and is of course miles better than the torture that is listening to Joe Buck and Tim McCarver. The strangest thing is how the delay between GameDay audio and DirecTV seems to vary minute [...]

For today’s Giants-Phillies NLCS game 6, I’m using the same setup as described in my earlier post. It’s working moderately well and is of course miles better than the torture that is listening to Joe Buck and Tim McCarver.

The strangest thing is how the delay between GameDay audio and DirecTV seems to vary minute by minute. It’ll be steady at around nine seconds, then drop to seven and go up to twelve, all without any pauses in the audio stream. This means I have to keep my VNC window (all the audio processing software is on my old Dell Windows laptop) open and adjust the buffer in Radio Delay every so often. I can see several reasons for the delay between radio and TV and therefore between radio or GameDay and DirecTV, but I can’t quite grasp how the delay can vary in realtime without the stream dropping or pausing.

It seems to me that the overall delay is the result of the differing paths the audio and video take to reach me. If I was listening to KNBR on a standard AM radio, I’d be hearing the play-by-play in near-realtime; the signal goes from the ballpark, through KNBR’s onsite processing/uplink, to KNBR’s studio, to Sutro Tower and then to my radio. Most of that happens via broadcast, i.e. speed-of-light, and is point-to-point with no satellite bounce. Add another couple of steps for retransmission to MLB’s studio so it can go out over GameDay audio, and of course the streaming audio is affected by Internet speeds.

The video path is very different and a lot longer. It goes from the ballpark, through Fox Sports’ onsite processing/uplink (“the truck”) to Fox Sports’ central studio or processing center–I don’t know where that is, or if they use KTVU’s facilities–to KTVU’s studio in Oakland, to DirecTV’s facility in Denver and then via direct-broadcast satellite to me. There are at least two satellite round-trips there, possibly three depending on how the signal is sent from the Fox Sports truck to their central facility. The signal is encoded, decoded and re-encoded an unknown number of times during the whole process, and that takes time as well.

Most of the above is speculation based on some knowledge of how these things tend to work and a bit of research. I’d love to know any better and/or corrected details.

Why: http://dodgerhater.blogspot.com/2010/10/say-no-to-buck-mccarver-delay-radio.html How: http://www.botecomm.com/bote/radio/radiodelay.html (Radio Delay With MLB Gameday Streaming Audio, Virtual Audio Cable method). Yes, I paid the $20 to MLB for Gameday Audio streaming. I gave up on getting listenable sound from a portable AM radio into the laptop. It sounds fine from the radio, but as soon as it’s connected to the [...]

Why: http://dodgerhater.blogspot.com/2010/10/say-no-to-buck-mccarver-delay-radio.html
How: http://www.botecomm.com/bote/radio/radiodelay.html (Radio Delay With MLB Gameday Streaming Audio, Virtual Audio Cable method).

Yes, I paid the $20 to MLB for Gameday Audio streaming. I gave up on getting listenable sound from a portable AM radio into the laptop. It sounds fine from the radio, but as soon as it’s connected to the laptop there’s a huge amount of line noise and static. I think it’s coming from the TV equipment and being picked up by the audio cable, but I haven’t found a way to block it.

1. Install and start Virtual Audio Cable.
2. Start Radio Delay with input device set to Virtual Cable 1 and output device set to the computer’s audio device (e.g. SigmaTel Audio, etc).
3. Try playing a sound file on the computer. It should register on the “Input Device” side of Radio Delay, silently, and then playback through the “Output” side with audio.
4. Launch GameDay audio.
5. If the GameDay audio feed is playing without delay, stop and restart Radio Delay.

So far, with quite a bit of head-beating and hair-tearing, this is working. I am waiting for the actual game to start so I can sync audio and video. There’s a sixteen second (!!) delay from KNBR to DirecTV, but I don’t know how much of a delay there will be between GameDay Audio and DirecTV. I’ll update this post later with that information.

Update 1: The delay seems to vary between nine and eighteen seconds, probably because MLB’s Flash audio player seems to stutter, pause and catch up. Unfortunately, changing the buffer in Radio Delay causes the current buffer to be cleared, so it’s difficult to properly sync the audio to video. So far.

In less than 24 hours all full-power broadcast TV stations in the U.S. will flip a switch to stop broadcasting their analog TV signals and will only broadcast TV signals in digital. This will make my cherished Casio TV-400 LCD minature color television obsolete. I bought it in early 1990 from a Radio Shack store [...]

In less than 24 hours all full-power broadcast TV stations in the U.S. will flip a switch to stop broadcasting their analog TV signals and will only broadcast TV signals in digital.

This will make my cherished Casio TV-400 LCD minature color television obsolete. I bought it in early 1990 from a Radio Shack store in a shopping mall near Fort Gordon, GA, where I was stationed for the second half of my Army training. Getting the common room TV tuned to whatever station “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was on was generally not going to happen, so this was my solution.

Since then, the little TV-400 has been useful now and again for baseball games (bring it to the stadium to see the instant replays they won’t show on DiamondVision), for breaking news (brought it to the office on 9/11) and, with the appropriate adapter, as a quick way to see if a given cable-TV outlet was active.

As of tomorrow, all but the final use will no longer be possible, and as cable TV companies gradually move their entire service to digital that one won’t last much longer either. I could always get a government-subsidized digital-analog converter box, but for a tiny portable TV that seems kind of silly.

It still works perfectly and I am loathe to simply throw it away (e-waste recycle it, that is). What would you do with it and why?

11:05 On the road w/Alex & Lani, going to Sac for the day. # 11:51 Traffic sucks. # 13:53 At a Mexican restaurant, the name of which I have already forgotten, in Old Sac waiting to be seated. # 13:58 Ps. It’s hot. Really damn hot. # 14:02 There are, however, horses. # 17:23 At [...]

• 11:05 On the road w/Alex & Lani, going to Sac for the day. #
• 11:51 Traffic sucks. #
• 13:53 At a Mexican restaurant, the name of which I have already forgotten, in Old Sac waiting to be seated. #
• 13:58 Ps. It’s hot. Really damn hot. #
• 14:02 There are, however, horses. #
• 17:23 At Raley Field for the River Cats / Grizzlies game. #
• 19:54 Grizzlies 7 River Cats 0, bottom 2nd. Ouch. #
• 20:00 Scenes from AAA baseball: fan offered either a coffee mug or $50 to hit his wife in the face with a pie. He took the cash. #
• 20:54 15 – 0 Grizzlies, top 5th. Was a no-hitter until a few minutes ago. #
• 21:57 And the final score is 15 – 0. #
• 22:24 On the road home. Entertainment was basically a bust but the company was good. #
• 00:27 Home. Bed. #

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Sigh. Baseball sure is pretty in HD on the 58″ plasma. Even watching Your 2008 San Francisco Giants blow it in ways previously thought unblowable was… well… yeah, never mind. Let’s go Oakland?

Sigh.

Baseball sure is pretty in HD on the 58″ plasma. Even watching Your 2008 San Francisco Giants blow it in ways previously thought unblowable was… well… yeah, never mind.

Let’s go Oakland?