[General Lee]

Seemed like being willing and able to quad that big set was key...neat to see a ballsy move like that rewarded.

anyone else catch dan's line in the final? did the quad while transferring to the left so he could rail the next turn. Awesome riding.

it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility that the Atherton family will come out of a world cup weekend with 3 wins one of these days.

 

[sirbikealot]

anyone else catch dan's line in the final? did the quad while transferring to the left so he could rail the next turn. Awesome riding.

it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility that the Atherton family will come out of a world cup weekend with 3 wins one of these days.

that would be the most amazing and unrepeatable feat ever me thinks!!

 

[stiksandstones]

anyone else catch dan's line in the final? did the quad while transferring to the left so he could rail the next turn. Awesome riding.

it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility that the Atherton family will come out of a world cup weekend with 3 wins one of these days.

That would be the best ever.

 

[SuboptimusPrime]

anyone else catch dan's line in the final? did the quad while transferring to the left so he could rail the next turn. Awesome riding.

it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility that the Atherton family will come out of a world cup weekend with 3 wins one of these days.

I did see that...a bad ass line for sure. I can't fathom hitting something that large, in the wet with that level of precision.

 

[Transcend]

So in general, did the feed get ok for the finals? The actual quality of the stream was ok, just the buffering and no website loading issue?

 

[Laaz]

Couldn`t get it working for over an hour (no pic, errors, no website ...). But then suddenly it started to work for the finals. The picture was super clear with no streaming problems...

Hope it will work like that tomorrow...

 

[SuboptimusPrime]

I lost the feed a couple times earlier in the broadcast, but had a steady smooth feed from the men's small final to the end.

 

[stiksandstones]

So in general, did the feed get ok for the finals? The actual quality of the stream was ok, just the buffering and no website loading issue?

Here is my experience, and I detail it not to whine, but to make it better....

Logged into freecaster.com site to watch live race, loaded fine, race came on good, first bit was color test bars and live audio, they were testing etc, but could hear those guys.
I saw about 3 heats maybe 4 of mens racing, then video/audio froze.

So I closed everything on laptop (had laptop plugged into big HDTV hdmi watching, was rad) rebooted, freecaster site would not even load.

Tried desktop, mtblive, transcened, pinned, bikemag video would not start at all.

Went to neighbors house, he has dsl, i have FIOS, diff ISP's, he is on XP machine...nothing worked there either.

Gave up.

came back 20 mins later to try again, tried freezecaster, etc, none worked, last resort was PINNED website embedded deal, it began to play, saw consi round and final for men and women.

Nigel did a great job in booth, Warner needs some more media training and the german dude needs to be evicted from race site, he is horrible.

Once played, video quality and camera locations were mint for me.

Thanks



Oh, and Milan is going for the win

 

[norbar]

The quality was better than the last time the problem is that it was 10times as hard to get anything playing.

 

[Ray-Freecaster]

Stickman, thanks for the recap. It is very helpful to help us improve.

Producing a live webcast is complex for the following reasons:
- everyone wants to start watching at the same time that creates a bottleneck that slows down the servers
- as the servers are slow people refresh their pages which increases the load on the servers, thus creating a huge traffic jam
- as the servers fulfil requests, the viewers get their streams

To serve many viewers we have to work with an ISP that has a CDN (content delivery network) which in theory allows to serve video to a large number of people concurrently. I chose one partner for the 4X live as I wanted to stream in a h.264 to have a better quality yet the technology is not ripe. Thus I made a bad choice, wrong tyres a rider would say.

Thus before the semis we switched to another CDN and resumed the live in normal flash, that's when all started to run smoothly. Thus tomorrow for the downhill we will be in normal flash on hopefully a robust server set-up. I always keep my fingers crossed though.

Ultimately, beyond video server power, I'll also need more servers for the freecaster.tv site itself, but that requires dosh ....

The entire team at Freecaster is working hard and will improve with every race. Thank you for your feedback and guys keep on supporting us and tuning in.

Ray

Here is my experience, and I detail it not to whine, but to make it better....

Logged into freecaster.com site to watch live race, loaded fine, race came on good, first bit was color test bars and live audio, they were testing etc, but could hear those guys.
I saw about 3 heats maybe 4 of mens racing, then video/audio froze.

So I closed everything on laptop (had laptop plugged into big HDTV hdmi watching, was rad) rebooted, freecaster site would not even load.

Tried desktop, mtblive, transcened, pinned, bikemag video would not start at all.

Went to neighbors house, he has dsl, i have FIOS, diff ISP's, he is on XP machine...nothing worked there either.

Gave up.

came back 20 mins later to try again, tried freezecaster, etc, none worked, last resort was PINNED website embedded deal, it began to play, saw consi round and final for men and women.

Nigel did a great job in booth, Warner needs some more media training and the german dude needs to be evicted from race site, he is horrible.

Once played, video quality and camera locations were mint for me.

Thanks



Oh, and Milan is going for the win

 

[DHPeteinSC]

Ray, thanks for all your hard work! I know there had to be hell to pay to get this broadcast in the US. Good job!

 

[stiksandstones]

Ray, thanks for getting involved and troubleshooting, I guess at the end of the day we got to watch the main event and that is always nice.

Keep up the good work and tell the powers that be, you guys are bringing back racing, get ready for more of a flood of viewers.

 

[LMC]

exactly, live MTB is the best thing that has happened to the sport in years in my opinion. the quality of the broadcast was very good.

was warner taking the piss out of pagey being stripped of his worlds win with the 'have you ever won anything' comment or what??

 

[SofaKing]

I too, would like to thank you for your hard work. It can only get better.

 

[norbar]

Ray thx for the work and for writing here. I think most of the ppl understood the problem but its nice to hear from the crew.

 

[igotabike]

freecaster

thanks for the coverage. its great to be able to watch live.

 

[tmx]

Thanks! Although I haven't seen it yet because it's a sunny Saturday with lots of riding to be done. Just came in to check on results and switch bikes for the afternoon ride. However I'm none-the-less grateful for the service you all are providing and taking the time to explain all that.

What is dosh? Is it something we can help pay for by pay-per-viewing the races?

I can hear some people moaning but it seems if you kept it low priced, 5 or 10 bucks per event ...with an option to subscribe for the whole seasons worth of racing for a lower overall price per race, we cheapskates would cough it up for guaranteed live, uninterrupted viewing.

...Maybe it can be free the day after the event.

Thanks again!

 

[- seb]

Is there a re-run or at least some heats viewable anywhere? I was (shock, horror) out riding my bike so missed all the fun, I want to see this quad action

 

[bohorec]

CG fly by:

 

[- seb]

Good effort, cheers!

 

[ianl90]

mtbcut.tv has the mens final up.

 

[Transcend]

The finals runs will be up shortly.

 

[stiksandstones]

mtbcut.tv has the mens final up.

How does mtbcut have freecasters videos?

 

[rockwool]

Producing a live webcast is complex for the following reasons:
- everyone wants to start watching at the same time that creates a bottleneck that slows down the servers
- as the servers are slow people refresh their pages which increases the load on the servers, thus creating a huge traffic jam
- as the servers fulfil requests, the viewers get their streams

Maybe sharing that info with the broader public? Like below the screen, aswell as all sites that link on to your; Littermag etc.

 

[stiksandstones]

Maybe sharing that info with the broader public? Like below the screen, aswell as all sites that link on to your; Littermag etc.

I forgot which site it was, but in the mess of windows I had from various sites, one of them did have a notice 'refreshing page only increases load on server, please do not refresh, it will auto refresh as needed' I think it was mtb-live?

 

[Jeremy R]

Freecaster videos are not working for me.
I can go there, the videos load up but never start playing.
But I can go to mtbcut and play freecaster videos.:huh:

 

[fortenndu]

Freecaster is awesome, thanks guys.

 

[CBJ]

How did Dan pass Brian like he did? Did he just pedal faster or what happened?

 

[stiksandstones]

^ seems to me Dan really worked those backsides and let it go a bit more into that left that he almost got jacked on the heat before, but he pulled it, and got a wicked gap going. Dan rode that textbook-minus the lemon gatestart.

 

[CBJ]

Thanks for the explanation!

 

[LMC]

How does mtbcut have freecasters videos?

i dont think they are freecasters videos as such, freecaster must just buy the same footage as mtbcut.

mtbcut worked perfectly the whole way through the 4x today..

 

[- seb]

That was amazing watching, fantastic stuff. Can't wait to see some of the 4x in decent quality, but I suppose I'll have to wait for the next crop of DVDs circa 2009

SO pleased for Dan, great effort. The temptation to party hard tonight must be high!

Course looks frikkin nuts, a big improvement over the fairly tame Maribor one IMHO.

So good that I've just watched it 4 times Anyone got a vid of the small final with Gracia's pass?

 

[- seb]

No info on today's timed practice in the DH?

 

[Transcend]

i dont think they are freecasters videos as such, freecaster must just buy the same footage as mtbcut.

mtbcut worked perfectly the whole way through the 4x today..

Nope. MTBCUT is actually buying our audio etc.

 

[Akula_7]

Check out this press -release.

Affy's win won't last long, once the urine tests come back! hahaha!

http://www.vallnordbikeparkworldcup.com/press_en_7.pdf

 

[rockwool]

I forgot which site it was, but in the mess of windows I had from various sites, one of them did have a notice 'refreshing page only increases load on server, please do not refresh, it will auto refresh as needed' I think it was mtb-live?

Good to hear they've already thought of it, don't want anything to mess up my Sunday prOn. :biggrin:

 

[rockwool]

Check out this press -release.

Affy's win won't last long, once the urine tests come back! hahaha!

http://www.vallnordbikeparkworldcup.com/press_en_7.pdf

He's on Ketamin alright, dunno if they'll think of looking for that though...

 

[rockwool]

No info on today's timed practice in the DH?

Strangely non in either Dirtmag or on UCI.

 

[William42]

i think gracias pass was the highlight of the show, totally bummed he didnt pull through to the finals. Although, the one footer was pretty sweet, and dan totally killed it.

as far as the feed, worked quite well for me, only one real blip after about 2 minutes of no feed I closed the window, reopened it, waited about 20-30 seconds, sound came on but not video feed, waited another 30 seconds, and the video came back on. Smooth sailing besides that.

I agree with stik. also, they were way too rough on the girls, I see they're not as good as the guys, I dont need to have that told to me every single run they have, im not an idiot, and they were going way faster then I could have and riding the course like mortals, so it was fun watching them. Hope they're not so rough on the women in the DH, made it alot less fun. And doesn't do alot to help women advance in our sport either if they're just ridiculed, we can TELL they're not as fast as the men. Who cares, they're still fun to watch.

anyway, thanks for the feed, looking forward to waking up at 5:30 to watch it. Course I might just stay up all night drinking and watch it when it comes on, but either way, its awesome, much appreciated!

 

[rayhaan]

wow, that is one of the most amazing 4X races I have ever seen, dan atherton was absolutely flat to the mat! he deserves it, what a quality win! that quad he hit was so class!!! cant wait for the DH race...