pouët.net

All glow bracelets and necklaces have been distributed! Thank you to everyone who took one. I didn't want to go home with them. :) Stats: I handed out probably at least 210 bracelets plus the four or five necklaces.

Also, thanks to the local Target store that had $1 tubes of bracelets (15 per tube) and necklaces for $1/each. I wouldn't have done it if they weren't so cheap.

Party on everyone!

An addendum, thanks to truck who helped distribute a tube or so of those glow bracelets.

Thanks starchaser for those lovely ads, will be fun :)

I AM NOT AN ATOMIC PLAYBOY.

FWIW, I finally figured out why streaming has been so random for me: Of the four streaming servers in use, even though they are in the same AWS zone, they seemingly have very different external routing. (To the degree that the return path is 5 hops and ~40 ms latency different for me!) Which means that when you reload and pick a random one, it's potluck whether it works or not. So if it buffers a lot, reload and hope that the Flash player picks a different relay.

I think someone was looking for me Saturday, they wanted to give me a Deadline t-shirt ... v3nom perhaps? They're not on the party IRC so if they read this or someone who knows were v3nom is could see if we can get back together before the party ends, that would be nice.

Best revision compos ever, thanks and congrats everyone.

And mad props to the stream crew, it was perfect

Oh right! I have an e-mail address. Duh. Ignore my post above.

Wow. These compos. What wullon said, haven't seen such strong compos is basically almost all categories in years.

On behalf of all "Sofa sceners" (errm, cough, cough) I really have to thank the streaming team for their excellent work.

I was quite anxious to see that there were only hires (720p+) streams but that worked very well!

A lot of really great releases this year. Very cool to see that the scene is still so alive !

Thanks for the streams! Good job and excellent content. Some small hickups now and then, but generally I was able to enjoy most of the prods. (Full framerate to CRT would be nice but it is not possible with current technology)

I have never seen such a huge amount of psychedelic demos in any compo ever at any party. Seriously guys. I had to bang my head to the table at least one, and had tears in my eyes form laughter one moment, and out of strong emotioanl bond the other. Did you synchronise this? All came together and say 'let's freak out the audience during the pc demo compo' ? Even with a degree in arts and my fair share of viewings of psychedlic material, I was impressed.

Aaargh, dat party!

The 64k pc compo blew my mind. It showed me things I still don't believe! Soon I'll be on my way back to my glittering c-beams.

What Phoobie said :)

WHAT NUMTEK SAID!!!!

Also thanks to "Hans v er bot" and glxblt for hating myself later today...

@Scamp & co: Thank you for streaming the event!
Excellent work!

As soon as I switched to the the nightly VLC builds (3.0.0) from stable (2.2.0),
the streams worked like a charm here!

Congrats on what seems to be another nice party :-) I can't join in the unequivocal praise about the stream, though; while it was much better than last year, it still has quite some ways to go. In particular, 1080p just wasn't stable for me at all (even on the TG network, where there's like 30 gigabits free), and when watching at home, it was just unusable (two seconds data, two seconds skip, two seconds data, etc.). 720p (which had about 1/5th of the bitrate a typical TV broadcaster would use for 720p, on much more difficult content) died entirely at some point during the demo compo but thankfully came back quickly… except that for some reason, it skipped completely predictably whenever the screen was entirely or almost entirely black. (I talked to multiple different people who experienced exactly the same thing, in different countries and on different OSes.) The HLS never worked, just showed the same clip over and over. The stream servers with different routing giving wildly differing behavior (and why do you need four of them in the first place to support traffic levels of 2–3 Gbit/sec?). And so on.

But overall, again, it worked well enough that it was a positive experience and not a super-frustrating one as many previous years, and the Scenesat production was enjoyable as always. Thanks :-)

Do we get the recording of "Threeway With Ronny"?
Or at least the tracklist?

That performance was awesome!

Photowall was awesome!

Sesse: The streaming initially was planned by the orga team to go through a scene.org server which was supposed to have 10 GBit/s. It turned out to show massive packet loss when doing more than 200 MBit/s.

Due to this during the party I offered to setup some servers last-minute. Due to us having a record number of viewers this year (close to 1500!), we ran out of capacity, at which point I added another 4 Gbit/s using Amazon AWS instances.

So, no, it wasn't perfect in the beginning, but I think we managed to make the best out of it. And now we do have a perfect setup that can be re-used next year so it will be fine from the very start.

And big props to Cyraxx for doing most of the stream server setup work!

scamp: Good to hear you have a plan for next year, although I will add that my comments about skipping were about the two last compo blocks, which were at the end, not the beginning (so “perfect setup” is maybe stretching it a bit). There's a disconnect here somewhere, though: You say you added “another 4 Gbit/s” (presumably on top of existing capacity), but during the PC demo compo, it was announced that you were “at 2.4 Gbit/sec, and the servers are full”?

I don't know who said that. We had 1500 viewers at peak, and the servers weren't full. Out of the 1500 viewers we only received 4 reports about dropouts, so I guess these have been viewer-side network problems. Without doing a proper analysis you'll never know, but I guess you simply had packet loss between your end and Amazon. But as you can see in this very thread, it was perfect for others, so it wasn't a systematic problem on our end.

HLS worked fine for some, and didn't for others. It's a crappy broken Apple non-standard, and it's not under our control that most HLS clients are also broken in some way - in Safari for example HLS sometimes works, and sometimes only displays a black screen. That's why we labelled it as "experimental".

I had zero packet loss between my end and Amazon; well, at least not out of 200 consecutive ping packets. And again, I talked to multiple people in different countries that had problems with the 720p stream skipping when the screen was blank (which is a problem I cannot fully understand myself).

You certainly had _some_ systemic issues on your end; for instance, your TCP burstiness was way too high (try sch_fq for paced TCP; it really is great!). My experience with streaming, however, is that lack of negative reports does not actually mean much; people won't complain (especially when you have no obvious contact point for complaints on the page!), they'll either endure problems or just leave. The only way you can really know is to monitor objectively, and doing that on the client side can be hard.

FWIW, as I understand, it was Ziphoid who made the announcement about “full” servers, but it seemed he was talking to someone in the background (I obviously don't know who). Seemingly it was wrong, if you say you were below capacity.