Discussions

@AlonB: We have RSS for videos under a specific tag, but nothing like that for Events. As far as an email goes, we'll need to extend our notification system to handle that, but at the moment your best bet is RSS.

@DavidRSB: It's possible we need to do something to make this just work... does your version of Android support HTML 5 video with the H264 codec?

@DBegley: There is a place called "Lateral" at Plaza de Santa Ana that's awesome. And, if you are into beer, there is a pub in that same plaza where each table gets their own draft taps

@jjdurrant: No, there isn't a single link (they are all listed on the event page), but there is a RSS feed with all of the slides as enclosures

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/RSS/slides

Hey folks, it isn't 100% consistent (not every speaker hands in their slides on time for example, and some don't use any slides), but we generally upload the slides when we upload the video (usually the night after or the next day)

@wkempf: @MichaelCzepiel:  Hey Michael (and wkempf ), I'm the Channel 9 guy who you can beat up about yesterday's outage. So, it wasn't the conference Wi-Fi, it was completely us. Scaling up in Azure is easy, and we did scale up before the day started and we definitely scaled up once the CPU usage started to spike. And it was that CPU usage spiking up to 100% that caused the outage.

The key is though, we couldn't determine the *cause* of this CPU usage increase, and increasing the # of instances was *not* reducing the CPU usage significantly, we were just bringing up new nodes which would then quickly ramp up to 100%. The load on our site was actually higher before the CPU started to spike, and even when the load went down, the CPU usage stayed at 100%.

So, scaling up (easy as it was) was not solving our problem. Our theory is that some particular bit of code, that was being hit by TechEd attendees only, was causing the issue, not the overall site load. We spent most of the day and last night digging through code trying to figure out what event specific feature was causing the issue and we found quite a few areas where improvement was possible. We are watching the CPU load carefully today and have several people still digging into code, running traces and profiles.

Essentially our failure is that our pre-event testing and load was not a true representation of the load that the real event puts onto our site. We definitely feel your pain on this, trust me we were actively engaged trying to fix it and stayed on site until after midnight last night attempting to debug.

Hopefully today, and the rest of the conference, will proceed more smoothly.

@blowdart: @Jim Young: @FuncOfT: Hey folks, this is just a test of the Flash player (as blowdart noticed), not a test of a full fallback path. This is also intended only for live broadcasts (like the upcoming TechEd NA keynote, or Build 2013), which means that we wouldn't be able to fallback to HTML 5 on the phone (it doesn't support any form of live stream using HTML 5).

For live broadcasts we start with Silverlight, fallback to Flash, fallback to HTML 5 with HLS (for iOS devices) and then finally fallback to a secondary stream that is generated as a WMV that will play on Windows Phone.

For on-demand (everything else here on Channel 9), we go Silverlight, HTML 5 (with H264 and webm files to cover most browsers), then Flash, then a direct link to the WMV or the MP4 depending on the OS of the user.

For this though, it is just the OSMF player (http://www.osmf.org/strobe_mediaplayback.html) using the new smooth streaming plug-in from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36057). So it is a flash player hitting a smooth stream, not a Flash media stream like you'd normally see.

Thanks for checking it out!

@AnotherITguy: Ach, that's probably going to mess a few folks up. We'll filter out sessions with no start date from the webcal export.

@Ion Todirel: http://tearsofsteel.org/ 

http://media.ch9.ms/content/FlashTest.htm

For fallback on machines without Silverlight, we are testing a flash player that supports Microsoft's smooth streaming format... seems to work... I'm just not very familiar with flash, so not sure if it should work for everyone