Updated for 2015 ‘new’ Media Player



I have a feeling MLB.tvs annoying advertising won’t be addressed anytime soon, if ever. So I decided to block the ads. It’s a rather simple procedure.

After doing a little HTTP sniffing, I noticed that the MLB.tv service relies on a company named Auditude (fitting name really) for their in stream advertising needs. In order to eliminate the annoying advertisements that try their hardest to blow out your speakers or brainwash you with the same repetitive content, you just have to tell your computer to make all outgoing calls to their servers fail.

Just edit your computers hosts file to redirect all auditude and freewheel requests to your localhost. On my mac, I opened up Terminal and ran this command:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

Once the hosts file opened, I just added these lines:

#for disabling ads on mlb.com

127.0.0.1 ad.auditude.com

127.0.0.1 asset.auditude.com

127.0.0.1 click.auditude.com

127.0.0.1 adm.fwmrm.net

and saved it.

Viola, no more ads between innings. You’ll just see the un-intrusive and silent ‘Commercial Break in Progress’ screen. All is well in the land of streaming Tiger’s games.

EDIT: if you have a debug version of the Flash player, you will have to click ‘Dismiss All’ after the first unhandled SecurityError thrown by the MLB.tv player. It pauses playback while the dialogue box is visible, and just hitting ‘Continue’ will not suppress more of these errors throughout the stream.