[FrancesHinden]

It didn't work for me, but I tried it from work behind a firewall that also won't let me log on to BBO the normal way. I shall try from home at some point.

Quote

As a nontech player I am not sure what this is all for.
I did not see any benefits as a user at this point.
Perhaps this is all so bbo can be played on devices other than a basic PC?

Techie arguments aside, one big benefit is to let you use BBO without downloading and installing software. That's a techie point you say? Well, only yesterday I was thinking about how good something like this would be, without knowing this thread existed.

We were visiting my mother who is currently in hospital and going crazy from boredom. She cannot use her own laptop with its wireless connection as no wireless connection is available (they don't like them in hospitals, along with mobile phones) but has available an "entertainment centre" which for £2.90 a day gives radio, TV and internet access. She can't 'download' BBO because it's only a terminal, but if it has internet access, I imagine it can use BBOTV.

More generally, internet cafes and similar generally don't let you download and install software.

[rona_]

I love the colours. Would prefer the red cards a little brighter.

Off to try it on vista now.

Rona

[DrTodd13]

After reading this thread again, I guess I saw the hostname and port number that bbotv is using. The firewall solution at least for me involves modifying bbover.ini to set the server name and address to my local machine and then I have a tunnel from my local machine to the bbo server. Unless I can modify the target server and port, I don't think I'll be able to setup a tunnel with bbotv. This is a huge negative for me.

[fred]

DrTodd13, on Aug 6 2007, 05:51 PM, said:

After reading this thread again, I guess I saw the hostname and port number that bbotv is using. The firewall solution at least for me involves modifying bbover.ini to set the server name and address to my local machine and then I have a tunnel from my local machine to the bbo server. Unless I can modify the target server and port, I don't think I'll be able to setup a tunnel with bbotv. This is a huge negative for me.

For now host is bridgebase02.bridgebase.com (69.93.3.164) and port # is 3336.

This could change at any time (not that I have any reason to believe it will change soon).

Before you actually try to connect to BBO using BBOTV, you first have to be able to get to www.bbotv.com where some files will download automatically through port 80.

I don't really understand the hows or whys of your firewall (no need for you to try to explain). Assuming your configuration does not fall into the category of "highly unusual" we will likely to try provide a solution for people with such configurations at some point in the future.

But that might not happen until we get closer to the official release (which is still months aways). Sorry but for now we have other priorities.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Trumpace]

Not sure if someone mentioned this before, but I do hope you will have a "text" version of the cards (like the current BBO client), instead of just the pictures of the cards.

[kenrexford]

TimG, on Aug 6 2007, 08:54 AM, said:

When I read that there was a BBOTV, I immediately thought that there was going to be some sort of television program/network. Sort of like FoodTV is a network for food programming.

Let's see:

Good Leads
Iron Defender America
30 Minute Deals
Going Down with Bobby Flay
The Barefoot Countsignaller
Everyday Italian Cuebidding

And, my favorite:

The Essence of Board-a-Match (think about this one for a bit...)

[fred]

Trumpace, on Aug 6 2007, 06:21 PM, said:

Not sure if someone mentioned this before, but I do hope you will have a "text" version of the cards (like the current BBO client), instead of just the pictures of the cards.

Right click on the green table top. A menu will appear that will allow you to switch to hand diagram mode.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[DrTodd13]

I followed the pointer in the other thread and the software downloaded and it gets to the point where I click "log in anonymously" and then it sits there trying to connect.

[Aberlour10]

I like it

the only thing is...I still use 800x600 resolution and the BBO TV screen is not completely displayed, I can see for ex. the whole chat window only if I "hide" manually all explorer menu bars and adress window.

Robert

EDIT: Solved, I launched it in a pop-up window now. works fine

[Gerardo]

Hand diagram for movies has a separate setting from main window one.
Right click on movie window to set.

[sceptic]

I am intrigured as to how the shuffle works in my hands (what it actually does)

the (I assume the old movie button) my hands at the table feature is cracking looks like a lot of people are going to enjoy that, in fact that looks to me like it has so much potential for people that take bridge hands analysis seriously, another winner from BBO

[BillHiggin]

I have less than perfect color vision (I have never passed a color blindness test more sophisticated than red/amber/green traffic light type). The red cards are a real issue for me. They appear brown (and not that distinct from the black cards - but at least the borders are not a problem for me). The regular BBO display uses a red that is easy for me (yes - it does look red - I think, but then I have never really seen what the rest of you see).

[awm]

BBOTV works very smoothly for me under both Linux and MacOS. I'm looking forward to the day when I won't have to emulate a PC to play on BBO.

I did see an auction today of 1♦-P-1♥-1♠-1♠, but I suspect this was vugraph operator error and not a problem with the software.

[hrothgar]

Hi Fred:

Here's a number of comments in no particular order (Please don't take the frequent kvetching the wrong way. Its often easiest to find things that warrant improvement. By and large I think that this will be a big improvement over the traditional client. As I understand matters, your main goal was to avoid the need to push updates to non-technical users. Here you've succeeded admirably)

1. On my home PC, I can't connect using Internet Explorer. (I get to the initial page, but the system stalls at http://www.bbotv.com...mbed_kiosk.html. It doesn't matter if I select a popup, the same web page, or even the no- stall option. Things are working fine with Firefox.

2. The proportions of the cards looks off to me. The cards (and the associated fonts) look thiner than they do on the traditional client. I don't think that the change is for the better. I think that the “hand diagram” option looks much better and would recommend using this as the default.

3. Do you have any ability to play games with the browser navigation bars? In general, I am happy with the way I have my browser. However, when I'm running the new application I'd like to minimize many more toolbars than normal in order to maximize screen real estate. It would be nice if the BBO app was able to control this. (I know that many flash apps are able to go into a full screen mode)

4. If I Right Click on the cards and use the “Zoom In” option, I can't zoom back out

5. I like the fact that I can cut and past from the chat window. Enabling “Control C” to copy is particularly useful, as is the fact that suit symbols translate over to other editors. It would be nice if we could also copy an auction in the same way.

6. Once the application takes you to a table (for spectating) it always takes you to the same table.

[keylime]

I tested it on my Mac tonight and it worked very well. Huge grins erupted when the knowledge of being able to play BBO and not having to deal with emulation software hit me - I bought software for the sake of playing BBO and doing one other program that the Mac could not do.

[cnszsun]

uday, on Aug 6 2007, 10:30 PM, said:

perhaps the port in question (3336) is an issue for some PCs. Maybe I'll try moving the port and see if that helps, but i'll wait just a little bit first.

Hi, Fred and Uday,

I really hope the firewall problem can be solved in the official version of BBOTV. If i'm correct, it should also be one of the advantages by adopting browser-server structure.
Many people like me are browsing internet through company's proxy server. I'm not expert on internet connection, but maybe only port 80 is allowed?
I can watch the video on YouTube, but not BBOTV. Because both are using Adobe flash, it should not be a big issue to solve it.

[Gerardo]

Actually, it is not so simple. Youtube is unidirectional, BBO is bidirectional.

Hard to find a port which would work from behind a corporate firewall. And 80 might not work if firewall requires HTTP on that port.

[uday]

I think the only way I can come up with that will work behind a firewall is to either have the client connect to whatever host/port user wants (to allow him to redirect, as DrTodd does) or to try to use HTTP instead of a socket. We'll probably try both over time.

[Dwingo]

Any way of seeing Player profile my mousing over his name? ( like in the client version )

[fred]

Dwingo, on Aug 7 2007, 05:00 AM, said:

Any way of seeing Player profile my mousing over his name? ( like in the client version )

Not yet.

There are a lot of things we have either not implemented or implemented and not enabled. There rate to be several new versions of BBOTV announced during the next couple of months. Some of the functions you will probably see in the next few versions included:

- non-anon logins
- ability to chat
- lists of players (friends/yellows/stars)
- ability to play

It is less clear when profiles will be made available, but I am guessing that it won't be too long and that some limited form of profiles might make it into the next version.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com