Update (12 Sep)

All of the session videos are now up and the high-quality video files are linked to the thession pages - Step 11 is COMPLETE

The encoding process is proceeding apace and last I looked, there are 10 sessions to complete encoding - Step 12 is 93%

I now need to a final pass through the system and find any videos that had errors in encoding. I'll do this over the next few days. If you find a session with missing formats or with incorrect links, feel free to leave a note here or directly on the session page.

Background

A couple of days ago, I blogged about uploading and encoding the session recordings from TechEd Australia 2011.

Some people have had a less than optimal experience streaming the videos. That's because the original WMV file for each session is about 200MB and the Smooth Streaming version isn't available yet.

This post is a little more detail on the process itself, as well as a look at where we're at in the process and how long it's likely to be before all of the sessions are up in all their formats.

The Process

1. Send the Channel 9 team details of the event so they can create an event landing page
   COMPLETE
   • Create a banner and a bunch of other artefacts to conform to their standard format and to match the theme of the event
     
   • Get admin access to the site, and then make sure that admin access includes the sub-parts of the site
   • Done pre-conference
2. Record the sessions (all 160 of them)
   COMPLETE
   • whatever goes to the screen and whatever comes through the speakers to a 640x480 WMV
   • Retrieve each raw file from each room after each session and give it to the editor
   • Sessions were captured onto a dedicated PC by putting a USB pass-through video capture card directly into the AV stream and using Expression Encoder 4.
   • Done
3. Top and Tail the recorded sessions (all 160 of them)
   COMPLETE
   • cut out the 10 minutes between when record was hit and when the speaker started and the 10 minutes from when the speaker stopped to when the stop button was hit
   • Re-encode
   • This was done on-site at TechEd and over the following weekend by one person dedicated to the task (thanks Nick - you're a legend)
4. Transfer the Edited Files (all 160 of them, about 50GB in total)
   COMPLETE
   • From the editor to the processing team
5. Sanity Check 1
   COMPLETE
   • check that the naming conventions are right and that the files are a sensible size
6. Retrieve the final decks from the speaker manager
   COMPLETE
7. Upload the Slide Decks to Azure Blob Store (all 160+ of them, about 890MB in total)
   COMPLETE
   • Use a custom uploading app written by the Channel 9 team
8. Upload the Edited Files to Azure Blob Store (all 160 of them, about 50GB in total)
   COMPLETE 
   • Use a custom uploading app written by the Channel 9 team
9. Create a Spreadsheet with
   COMPLETE
   • Session Details (Code, title, abstract, date and time of session, Speakers)
   • Name of the WMV file and the PPTX file (generate a URI based on some assumptions)
10. Sanity Check 2
    COMPLETE
    • Check that the URI for each of the files generated in the spreadsheet doesn’t 404 using a link checker I wrote for the purpose
      
    • Fix any mis-named files, either in the blob store or in the spreadsheet
11. Send the Spreadsheet to the team at Channel 9 so they can create the individual pages for each session
    70% Complete 
    • This step can be repeated any time info changes, new files are added, etc
12. Encode the WMV file
    40% Complete
    • multiple other formats
      • Smooth Streaming
      • Low resolution WMV
      • MP4
      • Low resolution MP4
      • WMA
      • MP3
      • JPG thumbnail (multiple sizes) from the first frame of the video
    • Upload the encoded formats back to Azure blob storage and get it out to the CDN
    • Link to the various formats from the session page when they’re done
    • This is all done automatically and asynchronously using background processes. We can monitor the status of the encoding jobs
13. Deal with exceptions manually
    Ongoing
    • Speakers needing session recordings removed/edited
    • File name changes/errors
14. Explain the process to as many people as possible
    Ongoing
15. Monitor Twitter and the comments on the sessions themselves so anyone who hasn’t read this can be pointed at it
    Ongoing

Where We're At

Steps 8 through 15 are repeated as more and more files become available.

Steps 8-10 (file upload): At the moment, we've uploaded 152 of the video files up to the blob store and 157 of the slide decks, so there are only a few exceptions to track down. We'll call this part pretty much done.

Step 11-12 (update by Channel 9 folk and encoding): The session details for all sessions, the slide decks for all sessions and the video files from Wednesday and Friday at TechEd have been submitted via spreadsheet to Channel 9 and have therefore kicked off the encode process. The encode process is (as you might imagine) fairly processor intensive. There are 4 machines dedicated to encoding Channel 9 videos and each session takes about 2 hours.

Step 13 (Exceptions): There have been a few of these, but dealing with them manually has been pretty straight forward.

Step 14-15 (communication): This post is part of that, but I'm also monitoring the #auteched tag on twitter, the individual comments on the sessions and direct emails to me and the rest of the TechEd team. If you see someone who doesn't understand the process or is wondering about when things will be "finished", please point them here. If you've got questions about any of this, please feel free to leave a comment here and I'll do my best to clarify.

Bottom Line

By my calculation, if the process continues to go as smoothly as it has to date, we should have the rest of the links to the high-quality (but slow to download) videos up by Thursday evening AEST (8 Sep), and the encoding to multiple formats done by Sunday evening AEST (11 Sep). If that changes, I'll update this post.

Aussie developer Yann Duran has just published his second Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 extension. The Luminous Controls extension is currently a TextBlock and a GroupLayout control.

This is the second LightSwitch extension Yann's published, the first being Luminous Themes. He's in the process of writing Pro Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 Development for Apress with Tim Leung.

Way to go Yann!

Update 4 Sep 2011 - The videos and slides are beginning to appear on the Channel 9 TechEd Australia 2011 Site.

Once again we've captured all of the main track sessions from TechEd Australia this year. We grabbed whatever video went to the screen and whatever audio went to the speakers. This means we've got almost 170 75-minute sessions to do the following to:

1. Edit the files to remove the extra time at the beginning and the end then re-encode
2. Upload the 200+ MB file to an Azure blob
3. Process the high quality file to produce about 5 other formats including audio only, a couple of MP4 versions, at least one more WMV and some jpg thumbnails, as well as a smooth-streaming version
4. Upload the slides to the an Azure blob
5. Create the landing page for each session which will allow you to view the session and/or download any or all of the formats in 3 and 4 above (linked from http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/Tech-Ed-Australia-2011)

As of right now, numbers 1 and 4 are complete. Number 2 is about 10% done, number 3 is yet to start and while the pages are up (5), there's not yet a link to even the slides. Of course, if you were at TechEd Australia, you can log into the Schedule Builder and download slides from there.

I'll keep this blog updated every once in a while with the progress of things.

Early this morning at the Build Conference we announced some exciting new Windows Azure tooling and service enhancements.

• Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8
• Windows Azure SDK 1.5
• Geo-Replication for Windows Azure Storage
• Windows Azure Marketplace
• Service Bus September Release
• Windows Azure Service Management API

Check out the announcement on the Windows Azure team blog.

As part of our developer readiness outreach, our Visual Studio Product Manager, Ibrahim Hamza, has organised what sounds like an excellent session on maximising your productivity with Visual Studio 2010.

Learn how to become a Visual Studio coding guru! In this fast-paced session, learn to write code faster than a speeding bullet, leap around large projects in a single bound, and become more powerful than a locomotive with the debugger. We take a wild ride through C# and Visual Basic IDE features in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and indispensible out-of-the-box solutions that will help you get your job done better and faster.

This is an online session that, unusually for this kind of thing, is running in daytime hours in Australia! Might even be worth gathering your development team and making a training afternoon of it.

Tuesday 27 September 2011, 14:00-16:00 AEST

Sign up here.

My TechEd Australia sessions proved to be pretty popular and I had a great time catching up with people afterwards.

The number 1 resource you need for LightSwitch is http://msdn.com/lightswitch

Here are the decks:

While we were at TechEd (talking, by the way, about Visual Studio LightSwitch, twice), the LightSwitch team released a GDR (General Distribution Release, aka update) to "resolve an issue encountered when publishing to SQL Azure"

"This is due to a recent SQL Azure server upgrade which caused the version incompatibility"

While I was overseas, the Windows Azure team announced the availability of the

• August 2011Release of the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and
• updated Windows Azure Platform Training Kit

Grab 'em while they're, if not hot then at least luke warm.