A review of MLB.tv, MLB Mosaic, and MLB Extra Innings for the 2007 season (page 4 of 5)

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A review of MLB.tv, MLB Mosaic, and MLB Extra Innings for the 2007 season

(page 4 of 5)

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Like last season, Mosaic allows you to watch up to six games at a time. As you can see in the screenshot on the right, all of the games are displayed in tiny little windows inside Mosaic. If you click on a window, you hear the audio for that particular game. This season they've significantly increased the quality of the video streams when you're watching the six game window. This gives a clearer tiny picture, but I still rarely use the six screen mode. I find it too chaotic.

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I spend most of my time watching my favorite team in the single screen mode. In single screen mode, you can also increase the size of the video to take up the entire mosaic player and to take up the entire screen (though this could be pretty taxing on your computer and might make the video jitter if you don't have a decent video card). The default screen size in single game mode is a little bigger than the default size in MLB.tv. Games that are broadcast in high-def will be widescreen with black bands on the top and bottom like when you watch a DVD on a non-highdef television.

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The other Mosaic feature I find myself using a lot is the player tracker. If you have a fantasy team or a set of players you like to follow, you can enter them into the player tracker for your account. This player tracker is updated through your web browser and stored at MLB, so when you start MLB Mosaic on other machines, you don't have to reenter the players for each machine (though see the note about OS X below if you have a Mac). I use the player tracker to watch my fantasy players hit or pitch during the commercials or low points of the main game I'm watching.

Once you've entered you're players into the player tracker, their names will appear in an "Alert" on the bottom part of the Mosaic screen whenever any of them is on deck, batting, on base (it tells you the base), or pitching. If you click on their "Alert", you are immediately taken to their game, so you can watch them bat or pitch. If you don't add a list of players to track, Mosaic alerts you to everything that is happening in baseball at that moment, which can be a little distracting. So if you don't want to use the player tracker feature, you might want to add a bench player just to keep the alerts from constantly scrolling by.

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Caveats
I'm writing this review in the fourth week of the season, and by now the major bugs and common crashes have been removed. The program is still unstable and freezes up from time-to-time, but I use MLB Mosaic almost exclusively rather than MLB.tv. I only use MLB.tv at work when I want most of my screen devoted to proper work rather than baseball. In these cases, it's nice to have MLB.tv with its smaller profile to allow me to get things done and still keep an eye on the game whenever it sounds like something exciting might be happening.

Windows XP
Mosaic on Windows XP still freezes up a lot, although it crashes less than on Mac OS X. If it freezes, you have to close the application window and wait a few seconds. If you start Mosaic immediately after you close it, it will crash with some kinda software error. Wait 20 seconds, and then start the Mosaic application again.

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