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A review of MLB.tv, MLB Mosaic, and MLB Extra Innings for the 2007 season(page 3 of 5) The first advantage of MLB.tv over MLB Extra Innings is that you can watch the games from any computer with high speed internet access by simply logging in with your Major League Baseball username and password. With MLB Extra Innings, you can only watch the games at the location where you've purchased the cable package. The second advantage of the MLB internet packages over the Extra Innings package is that you have access to the MLB archive. In the archive, you can view huge amounts of old footage and great games from Major League Baseball (which I never do). More importantly, the archive gives you access to recent previous games, plus highlights and condensed versions of these previous games (which I watch a lot). So if you miss a game, you can watch a condensed version of the game that cuts out most of the dead time in the game like when the pitcher throws to first base seven times in a row (condensed games last 10 min or so).Caveats No matter which plan you choose, there are a few things to keep in mind before deciding on the internet MLB packages. If you're not the least bit computer savvy (e.g. you can't install a few basic programs), you might have trouble getting things to work. Also, the internet packages are certainly not as stable as the Extra Innings package. If your own internet connection tends to go out from time to time, so will your baseball viewing. Even if you have a fast, stable connection, I'd say at least 4-10 times a game the connection will get a little shaky. Sometimes it will just freeze for a couple seconds. Other times it might give you only the audio and the video will go black for a little while. I don't usually find this too troublesome, but it does happen every now-and-again during a crucial part of a game, which irritates more. Windows On Windows XP (haven't tried the others), I can't get the games to play with Firefox. The games play fine however on Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). In general, the features like resizing the video screen only work well on Windows. Mac OS X The Windows Media Player for the Mac is old and crappy. Because MLB.tv relies on the media player, using MLB.tv on a Mac leaves a little to be desired. I haven't been able to get most of the screen resizing features to work. So you're pretty much stuck with the default screen size. MLB.tv will work with Firefox but not Safari. I've found things work a little better if you use the Flip4Mac software that is required by MLB Mosaic. Which MLB.tv package should I buy? Like I said earlier, the premium package gives you access to higher quality video streams and MLB Mosaic. Not considering Mosaic for the moment, the difference between 400K streaming and 700K streaming is significant but not drastic. Despite an almost doubling in the stream size, the quality certainly doesn't double (this is due to the way lossy video compression works, and we won't get into that here). If it weren't for MLB Mosaic, I'd go with the standard package. However, for Fantasy baseball fans, MLB Mosaic is very useful. So let's discuss it now. Review of MLB Mosaic Click image for larger Previous Page | Next Page Skip to page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |