It’s probably a good thing I waited until today to write this; otherwise, it would have been full of many colorful words. 
This is a follow-up to my last post. I tried to run NASCAR.COM’s RaceView during the Michigan race this past Sunday and all I got was either a window with “loading” at the bottom or just a solid white window. This occurred in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. I opened up the Java console in both Firefox and IE and it just had a Java error of a Null pointer assignment:
java.lang.NullPointerException at com.sun.opengl.util.JOGLAppletLauncher.start(JOGLAppletLauncher.java:385) at sun.plugin2.applet.Plugin2Manager$AppletExecutionRunnable.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) Exception: java.lang.NullPointerException
Yes, I did try to reload several times. So I gave up and just started PitCommand to listen to Dale Jr’s audio. I did have to start it in IE first before the audio would work in Firefox and I just didn’t care to investigate this further. I was frustrated and missing the race. Before you ask, I do meet their minimum system requirements.
Now, I don’t mind troubleshooting problems; however, I do not want to do it during the actual race! It totally ruins the fan’s experience. How can you expect fans to search knowledge bases and forums, reinstall Java, plug-ins, audio and video drivers, and do whatever else might be potentially involved? It boggles my mind that there isn’t a race simulator that we can test these applications with during the week. If I was a NASCAR website/TrackPass developer I’d scream for this. I am quite sure the website team has no desire to fix the software during races either (I only hope they at least have some internal system to do this). Normally I wouldn’t give a flying fruitcake about it, but I am paying more for TrackPass than I am for my webhosting here that my blog, among several other sites, is on. The IndyCar RaceControl works (yes, they do loose timing and scoring sometimes but that’s an issue at their end when it happens) and it’s free.
This will probably be my last season to subscribe to RaceView. If the preview works during next year’s Daytona 500 then I might reconsider; otherwise, I’ll just stick with the scanner.
I welcome any comments about other’s experiences and how you got it to work, if you did.
Thought I would follow up here and mention that I did manage to get it working during the Bristol race. Think I spent the first 200 laps of the race working on it in both IE8 and Firefox. A combination of what the NASCAR.COM website folks did (this is an assumption as I don’t specifically know what if anything they did) and what I did got it going. I would like to thank @NASCAR for alerting the website folks of my difficulties. I’ll most likely post another article with what I did.
thanks for the wisedom, hombre. keep smoking the code.
same crap today b4 Texas. I am a Java programmer and portability is what makes the language great but seems these guys r getting shoddy with advertising hooks that depend on IE extensions and such, or just sloppy code. My nullpointer exception today is because it is looking for a text properties (settings) file that the forgot 2 deploy, or set permissions wrong. Rookie mistakes. I won’t pay for it next year. thx
I am having the same problems on a new Windows install with brand new Java and Octoshape loaded. It doesn’t work in either IE8 or Firefox. This is my 3rd computer to try on. They have already auto drafted my 79.95 on Feburary 1, 2011. I have emailed support, but no reply back.
I tried using Raceview during the Bud Shootout but couldn’t get the video to work. I thought it was because my computer didn’t meet the minimum specs (3 year old HP laptop). I called a couple days later to cancel, but they already charged me 79.95 for the new year. I yelled at them for about 30 minutes trying to get a refund, but they refused. I even emailed them but got a BS stock answer. I bought a new computer the next week, with new Windows7, Octoshape, Firefox, Unity, WMP installs – exceeds all the minimum requirements. Still no video during the Phoenix race. And now the audio only works sometimes for the drivers (no problems with the Officials radio, but who wants to listen to those idiots). I tried everything they suggest in their help info on both IE and Firefox. At this point, I give up on Raceview. I got the subscription changed to 6-months for Scanner (about $15) and they will refund the rest. Damn NASCAR.com and their crappy product. Now I’m stuck with the horrible TV coverage.
Actually, RaceView changed to an Adobe Flash application and does not use Octoshape, Java, or WMP anymore. In order to get the video to play, you have to install a new player that’s specific to their application. I haven’t installed that video player yet because I don’t really need it. That’s what the 52″ HDTV in the other room is for.
As far as the audio goes, I have found that to force it to change audio streams I have to select the radio, then some other driver, and then the driver I want to listen to.
Anyway, it worked fine for me with both IE8 and Firefox with this new Adobe Flash application without me doing anything this year. All you should really have to do is go to http://www.adobe.com and install the latest Flash player.
I just spent the entire race trying to figure out what was wrong with Raceview. The “virtual video” wouldn’t work, so I spent three hours trying to find the cause of the problem. All radio communication was fine, but the video was either a blank screen, or it was in a constant state of buffering. I didn’t know if there was a setting I needed to adjust on my computer, or if there was a Raceview problem in general. The first two races worked fine with the video, but wondering what the problem is now is driving me crazy. I wish there was a help centre available for Raceview that had live support to answer these questions!
My Reaceview works just fine in Firefox ….. try to listen to the audio for any driver, MRN, ect. no go. I have done everything that I can think of with still no results … Pit command AOK.
Pit Command has worked fine with Firefox 4 for me as well for driver audio and so on. However, I have been having audio troubles with RaceView in Firefox 4. So, if I want to use RaceView, I just load it with IE8. I just haven’t bothered to troubleshoot it yet because I don’t want to during races and then I forget about it until the next race LOL. I need to do some race replays and see what happens with FF4.
The Michigan race was a total loss of features for me. I have two computers one with Windows 7 and Chrome, the other with IE8 and XP. Both have been able to get all features for everything until Michigan. I couldn’t access anything on either one and it would not even allow log in.
The login works fine today and I can access all my account information so it couldn’t have been that. If there were some tech problems it would have been good of them to announce it in stead of letting me fidget with my computers the whole race trying to fix them.
It looks like NASCAR Trackpass is getting as shoddy as NASCAR seems to becoming.
BTW, I entered a ticket complaint. Within a few minutes I recieved a response that the problem was solved and the request was deleted. That just makes no sense at all.
I actually had no problems with either RaceView or PitCommand for the race with Firefox 6.0 and Windows XP Home/SP3. I do generally keep up to date with the latest versions of Java and Adobe Flash (which RaceView now uses).