to setup a simple local web UI that allowed me to quickly search through every play and watch any single play I wanted. Video footage was available as soon as the game was over, and play info was available live as the game was playing. It was amazing.
This worked because nflvid downloaded full HD NFL games from their CDN, which was unprotected at the time. (I paid for an NFL Game Pass subscription and never distributed the video footage.) They also had XML files that delineated the time at which each play started and its duration. Some ffmpeg slicing and dicing was all it took to cut up a full game and associate each clip with each play. That's all part of what nflvid does.
I hacked all of this together in my free time years ago, and I bet a lot of people would find it amazing. One wonders why the NFL doesn't build this and sell it themselves. When I used Game Pass a few years ago, you could search for plays with rudimentary criteria, but only over a single game at a time. It was artificially very limited.
We briefly spoke via GitHub about a month ago, and during that convo (it was in a ticket), you mentioned that the source has inaccuracies. Is there any elaboration there or do the NFL people use a different data source to do things like Fantasy and official stats?
I'm not an NFL insider. I don't know what they do internally. I only know that 1) the undocumented NFL GameCenter JSON is not 100% accurate and that 2) any user of a fantasy league would notice these inaccuracies. I did a test a while back by comparing GameCenter data with Yahoo's data. Kickers tend to have the most inaccuracies: https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflgame/blob/master/test-data/... QB stats are more solid for example, but there are still minor problems: https://github.com/BurntSushi/nflgame/blob/master/test-data/...
From those observations, you can't really make any solid conclusions. But if you think about it for a bit, you might be able to reason your way to some guesses. For example, one possibility is that the GameCenter data is NFL's own construction that's only used for their GameCenter interfaces, where as places that "official" data is needed might be powered by Elias[1]. Why the discrepancy? Again, I don't know. It could be legacy software related. It could be contract/legal related. Or it could jus tbe plain old bugs. e.g., Maybe GameCenter hooks into an initial lossy but fast feed that is updated during the game, but never receives updates from a slower but more accurate feed later.
Or maybe the NFL purposely inserts data canaries because they know this JSON feed is unprotected, and they intend on using those data canaries to detect folks using their data in an unlicensed fashion. I'm pretty sure IMDb does this, for example. Or maybe they just insert errors purposely to make it too costly for anyone to use this data in situations that require 100% accuracy (like fantasy football leagues).
My guess is some innocuous blend of legal and legacy software reasons.
