They're getting a tad ridiculous now, and past my personal pain threshold for a download (around 600Mb), but come on 1.2Gb for the history of computing video?
Perhaps it's time to start lowering the quality, or offering a low-quality option. Do many people actually watch the videos in glorious hi-res anyway? I tend to have it slightly smaller on a corner of the desktop. (Multi-monitors FTW!)
-
Massif
aim stupidly high, expect to fail often.
-
W3bbo
Work hard; increase production; prevent accidents, and be happy.
There's also something going on with the encoding.
I've got hour-long DivX videos that smaller than hour-long C9 videos and play a LOT better on my PDA. My PDA's 620Mhz going at full-blast can only do like 0.5fps.
Maybe it's a case of Not-Invented-Here, but I don't think WMV is the best format. -
Maddus Mattus
Do, or do not. There is no try. - Yoda
DivX requires additional features installed. Maybe to keep a low threshold they volunteer some bandwith?
-
Massif
aim stupidly high, expect to fail often.
W3bbo wrote:There's also something going on with the encoding.
I've got hour-long DivX videos that smaller than hour-long C9 videos and play a LOT better on my PDA. My PDA's 620Mhz going at full-blast can only do like 0.5fps.
Maybe it's a case of Not-Invented-Here, but I don't think WMV is the best format.
I imagine the PDA is struggling because of the unnecessarily high resolution. The sheer quantity of data is chugging the PDA rather than some elaborate calculations in the decoding process.
WMV is perfectly capable of higher compression, I doubt anyone would miss the extra quality. -
Dodo
I'm your creativity creator™ :)
Massif wrote:They're getting a tad ridiculous now, and past my personal pain threshold for a download (around 600Mb), but come on 1.2Gb for the history of computing video?
Really? I have no problem with that, I can watch while downloading, and also am downloading it in seconds
-
W3bbo
Work hard; increase production; prevent accidents, and be happy.
Massif wrote:I imagine the PDA is struggling because of the unnecessarily high resolution. The sheer quantity of data is chugging the PDA rather than some elaborate calculations in the decoding process.
No, it's the encoding. I've played higher resolution videos on my PDA with no playback issues, they were just DivX, not WMV. But whilst the Channel9 videos are just shy of SDTV resolution, the video pixels are a little blurred, maybe this is because of optimization, but they could use a lower resolution with no real noticable loss of quality when shown fullscreen.
-
mig
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored. - Evelyn Waugh
I'm going to have to agree with Massif, it's not like there are action scenes where a high res encoding is needed. As long as we can see what's on the board clear (where applicable) I would be content with that. It would also make it easier on my hard drive when I download many videos to watch later (not that I'm lacking space) but I'd rather have more free space for other stuff than having 1.2G hour long videos.
-
I've stopped downloading videos because of the size. They used to be a reasonable size. What happened? 1.2 Gb is ridiculous. This seems like an "improvement" that noone likes except those who implemented it.
-
I stopped downloading them a ways back, too. I think they assume everybody in the audience has broadband at home or a T-1 line running up to their house.
-
littleguru
<3 Seattle
They have gotten really big - that's true. Something like HDTV and normal as on 8 and 10 would be nice - that's also true. I also wonder why they are so big compared to xvid/divx.
What's also interesting is that the fullscreen version isn't playable anymore here: it says that the wm.microsoft.com server isn't found aynmore. A trace is also having it's end somewhere in the MSN network. -
W3bbo
Work hard; increase production; prevent accidents, and be happy.
Cornelius Ellsonpeter wrote:I stopped downloading them a ways back, too. I think they assume everybody in the audience has broadband at home or a T-1 line running up to their house.
A T1 line is slower than today's cable and DSL speeds
It only exists because they have SLAs which you don't get with consumer connections.
-
Okay, I stand corrected. Still, not everybody has cable or DSL connections...and I can't imagine anybody with a dial up connection even comes here anymore.W3bbo wrote:
A T1 line is slower than today's cable and DSL speeds
Cornelius Ellsonpeter wrote:
I stopped downloading them a ways back, too. I think they assume everybody in the audience has broadband at homeor a T-1 line running up to their house.
It only exists because they have SLAs which you don't get with consumer connections. -
Lloyd_Humph
If Blackberrys are addictive cellphones, Channel9 is the ultimate addictive website.
Why don't we just put it on a Torrent site? Faster and quicker for everyone.
I'd gladly upload it, but is there call for it? -
Charles
Welcome Change
We will be offering more formats and lower res in the next release. For now, I'll see if I can get Sampy to modify his publishing tool to encode 1.0Mb/s download files for me.
Sorry about this, but a decision was made to go with 2.5Mb/s and my concern was that these types of threads would be invoked on C9 given the length of our videos (compared to, say, 10 or 8).
Let me see what I can do. Thanks for the feedback. Again, in the future, this will be moot...
C
-
W3bbo
Work hard; increase production; prevent accidents, and be happy.
Lloyd_Humph wrote:Why don't we just put it on a Torrent site? Faster and quicker for everyone.
I'd gladly upload it, but is there call for it?
That's not the issue. Microsoft's got the bandwidth, we don't.
Even with a 2Mbps connection (250KBps), a 1.5GiB video would take just over 104 minutes to download, assuming full saturation and perfect connection conditions.
But not everyone has 2Mbps, many are on 512Kbps.
But even if we're all on 8Mbps, it would take about 20 minutes to download.
-
Sampy
And I come back to you now - at the turn of the tide
Yup, it was me.
Our video encoding pipeline is standardized on a 2.5 Mbps 640x480 WMV format. The client application that submits the video rigorously checks the input file to ensure that it meets these requirements.
There are plenty of reasons for this. The pipeline has been clogged by bad videos many, many times. We get inconsistent input from some of the editors that 10 and 8 use sometimes and that can bust things. We also want to ensure that we have consistency across the network. When we say "WMV (High Quality)" you know what it means.
You'll get all video formats[1] in the future including a 512k 320x240 WMV. That being said, I can work with people internally to figure out a way to reduce the download size in the short term. Once we have a fix we like we'll get it on the schedule and get it deployed so new videos will have a more reasonable download size.
[1] 2.5Mbps WMV, 512k WMV, Zune WMV, MP4, WMA, MP3 -
I don't understand the complaints here. I was hoping the file size would actually increase. The higher the quality the better. I want to see every little smudge on the whiteboard behind Tim Sneath's head. The audio quality could use some work, however.
-
Lloyd_Humph
If Blackberrys are addictive cellphones, Channel9 is the ultimate addictive website.
Massif wrote:They're getting a tad ridiculous now, and past my personal pain threshold for a download (around 600Mb), but come on 1.2Gb for the history of computing video?
Perhaps it's time to start lowering the quality, or offering a low-quality option. Do many people actually watch the videos in glorious hi-res anyway? I tend to have it slightly smaller on a corner of the desktop. (Multi-monitors FTW!)
So what you're saying is that the files are Massif?
i had to
Thread Closed
This thread is kinda stale and has been closed but if you'd like to continue the conversation, please create a new thread in our Forums,
or Contact Us and let us know.