MIX07 Session Recordings

It's been awhile since my last post! The group I'm in, Developer and Platform Evangelism (otherwise known as DPE), is responsible for both MIX and PDC. If you hadn't heard, our sold out MIX07 event took place earlier this week in Las Vegas, and the weeks leading up to it were hectic for many of us. The event itself was a blast, and Silverlight stole the show.

If you weren't able to attend in person, or if you couldn't make all of the sessions, there's good news. All of the keynotes, breakout sessions, and panels were recorded, and many of them (I just counted around 80) are already available for viewing and downloading online. Traffic to the site has been very heavy, so please be patient if it takes a few moments to load.

To "up our game" this year, we decided to see if we could publish a rough version of each session within 24 hours. By rough, I mean a version that contains whatever was displayed on the screen in each breakout room with audio from the presenter. On average, we were able to turn each session around within 15 hours, and we had nearly every session up and available within 12 hours after MIX07 finished. That's pretty amazing!

Each recording is available (or soon will be) in four formats: Silverlight, Zune, video iPod, and downloadable WMV. We added the portable formats this year based on user feedback from last year. I hope you like them.

This isn't the end of the story! In a few weeks, we'll start to release higher quality versions that include video of the presenter (the "talking head") along with what you see today. Plus, we'll tweak the interface a bit and include index points for each presentation. If you watch one of last year's MIX06 recordings, you'll see what I mean. Subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified when new videos are published.

A few of the sessions won't be published until they've had their audio edited. Why, you ask? Well, it turns out that some conference attendees like to rip off the tape covering the sockets in our audio/video power strips (which are unregulated and could easily fry your laptop, by the way). By plugging their laptops into this line, it introduces a very noticeable hum in the audio track. To make the recordings useful, we need to edit the audio a bit, and this takes some time. :-)

Last, I need to congratulate and thank Brian Keller for driving the whole session recording process this year. I had this task for both PDC05 and MIX06, and I know that it takes a lot of work to pull off. Brian has done an outstanding job, especially considering the 24-hour turnaround times.

Let us know what you think! We read all of your feedback and will consider it for our next event.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 04, 2007
  Phew - it's been a long week! I spent the first half of the week down in Las Vegas. One of the projects

• Anonymous
  May 04, 2007
  When watching the recordings using Silverlight (Windows), I'm unable to skip through the video using the slider. It seems to use streaming video so I would think that I should be able to skip arbitrarily.

• Anonymous
  May 13, 2007
  I was finally happy to see some content for my Zune. To my regrets I discovered that the majority (12 of 13 files) of the files from the site still needs to be converted after downloading (yeah, and I did select download the Zune specific vids from the site ;-)).