Brian Keller

Thanks, Josh!

Thanks, Andrgin - actually I don't know how to change the Alt Gr key. Can you please elaborate? Feel free to point us to a URL if this is already documented somewhere. Since I live in the US and travel with my laptop when I leave the country I haven't had to work around this for myself, but I'm very interested in learning more.

Brian

Thanks for taking the time to elaborate, Mexilus. But the term "evangelist" used to describe our profession has been around for a very long time and is used by several companies across the industry, not just Microsoft. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_evangelist. In fact, the beloved Guy Kawasaki was an evangelist for Apple.

It's true that the title is unfortunately confused from time to time with that of religious evangelists. But you can say the same thing about several titles. For example, do you think that the Secretary of State is the person responsible for scheduling meetings and taking notes for the President? Is somebody with a "doctorate" in literary studies somebody you would go to if you broke your leg? Is the captain of a football team responsible for driving the boat?

Many words and titles have multiple meanings. "Evangelist" is one of those words. Unless the tech industry decides collectively to redefine the genre, I suspect we'll have technical evangelists as long as we have companies who produce and sell technology.

Thanks, Chris!

So that's 1 for the music... and 4 against. I will see if we can strike a balance. Maybe music during the transitions but not during the times that there's voiceover? We'll see what we can do and try to find a way of pleasing everybody.

You've asked an excellent question about the file sizes. Basically, the way that Channel 9 (and 8, 10, Edge, etc.) accepts videos for upload from guys like me is through a program called MagicFolder that the EvNet team (Sampy, Duncan, Erik, et al.) built and maintain. MagicFolder, until recently, used to require all "Videos" to be encoded using a 2500kbps profile. Unfortunately while that profile worked well for live action footage, it doesn't work very well for screen captures. Hence for screen captures, they allowed you to upload whatever video format you want and tag it as a "Screencast" - but the tradeoff was that it wouldn't be converted into Zune, MP4, MP3, WMA, etc. It wouldn't be converted into those formats because the process they used to produce those formats required a known input - hence the 2500kbps profile.

But a couple of weeks ago, EvNet adopted Expression Encoder for their encoding pipeline which is much more flexible with the file input. Hence I can now get the best of both worlds; I can encode my screencasts using a profile which is really designed to display screencasts in a high-quality but efficient (file size) format, and MagicFolder will still convert the file to the other file formats (Zune, MP4, MP3, WMA, etc.).  It's a really awesome option and I applaud the EvNet guys for enabling this feature!

Now what I suspect is that the files you're seeing which are 500MB to 1GB in range are still encoded at the old 2500kbps setting. One of the great things about Channel 9 is that we allow people from all over the company to produce and upload content. One of the downsides, however, is that not everybody is an expert at choosing the right encoding profile to match their content type and tune that balance of quality vs. file size. I have been doing this for several years now, and every time I shoot a new format it's still a learning curve to get it right. Hopefully over time we can educate more content creators on how to best shoot and encode their content. You can always feel free to post comments on their videos and tell them to buy me lunch, and in return I'll help them up their game.

Thanks for watching, and for commenting!

Brian Keller

dnjake - while it's true that Microsoft does not support Virtual PC on Vista Home Premium (or Home Basic), I have definitely talked to several users who have used it successfully on those platforms. You will get a message that says you're running on an operating system that's not supported, but you should be able to click past that and use it without any trouble.

You're right that not all of the functionality is there yet. Much more will be available in the next pre-release.

Brian

Thanks for the feedback Lawman and Chad - we had conflicting feedback on this one but this is something we'll revisit for future episodes. Metallica is going to be disappointed, though; they had signed on to do an exclusive album. I'll try to let them down gently.

Are you running 9 screens? If so, I want to see pictures!

Another clever use of Synergy: Hook it up to control your Media Center PC. That way you can use your laptop on your couch, and slide your cursor out to control the Media Center remotely.

No, this is analysis-only. You can't modify values. That's an interesting idea to consider for future releases, however.

I've got nothin' but love for ya, Minh! Hope you know I was only kidding.

The link works for me. There were some initial problems with the MP4 but those have been fixed. Can you try again?

I'm checking on this for you. If I can get it I'll post it here.

Sorry guys, we are working on making this one available. There was a problem with this particular recording and it has to be re-encoded. As soon as it's available we'll upload it here. Probably towards the middle of next week since the recordings are in the mail and en-route from LA right now.

In the meantime, you can view around 200 other PDC08 session videos here: https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/timeline.aspx