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Welcome to SwoofWare!

Welcome to my website. My name is Matt Smith and I am the guy behind SwoofWare.com. You can read a little more about me and this site on the About page - but let me take a moment to give you a bit of glimpse at who I am. - I am glad you are here, and hope you come back often. Feel free to surf around and see if you like what's on my site.

I am one of the founder of ThinkFirst, LLC, a web development company that specializes in web-based applications. Our primary project is MyHomePoint.

Besides my computer related activities, I keep busy with my wife and three kids. I am actively involved in Cub Scouts and was a Den Leader for three years and am now the Pack Committee Chair.

How to view the Netflix Silverlight diagnostic stats

March 29, 2009

I was watching Scott Guthrie’s (aka ScottGu) MIX09 keynote last night. Scott’s presentation was broken up every few minutes to have a presenter come on stage and perform a brief presentation on some bit of technology that he was introducing. There was even an appearance by StackOverflow’s Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, although they seemed surprisingly nervous in front of that audience. I wonder if it had something to do with the fact that their segment was basically a shill for Microsoft’s Biz Spark program?

One of the presenters was Kevin McEntee, Vice President of Web Engineering at Netflix. He talked about how switching to Silverlight has helped them with their Watch Instantly capabilities. Specifically he focused on:

  • How Silverlight helped them go cross-platform and support the Mac and Firefox (hopefully someday we will get Chrome support too!).
  • How building their viewer within Silverlight helps them to not have to trouble the consumer with installation programs. I forget the exact percentages he quotes, but it was something along the lines of 20% of Watch Instantly customers were bailing out of the installation process. And, in addition to not having an install, they were able to go from releasing updates yearly to now as often as every two weeks.
  • Finally, he talked about how Adaptive Streaming helps the Netflix viewer determine the best rate for the customer.

For the Adaptive Streaming part of the talk (about the 68 minute mark), he had someone (Jeremy) come out to demonstrate the Adaptive Streaming through one of their debugging screens. In the video, which shows a side by side view of the presenter and their screen, you can see that a context menu is brought up over the player.

Netflix Adaptive Streaming Diagnostics Context Menu

Jeremy then selects the first option, A/V Stats and then an overlay is placed on the screen. The overlay shows information about the audio and video bitrates, buffer size, etc. Kind of interesting, but as you can tell from the screen shots, it is kind of hard to get a good feel for exactly what is there. So immediately the question was, “Hmm, I wonder if I can get to that information?”

Netflix Adaptive Streaming Diagnostics Audio Video Stats

I noticed that when Jeremy was getting set to go into the debug/diagnostics screen, he did two things: First, there was a definite turn of the head to the left side of the keyboard. It was obvious he was getting ready to do something that didn’t involve touch-typing. Then, when the presenter camera switched views and pulled out on a long shot of Jeremy, you can see that his left hand is in an unnatural position on the keyboard. Once the context menu came up and he selected the A/V Stats option, he moved his hand back to a natural position. So, that led me to believe that there was some key combination to pull up the window.

It didn’t take long to find something, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. If you are in full-screen mode while watching a Netflix movie, press the Shift key and then right-click on the Silverlight container. You will get the following context menu:

Netflix Adaptive Streaming Diagnostics Context Menu

Selecting the Status Window option brings up the following window. It gives some nice information about how much has been downloaded, the download rate, where you are in the movie, how much time is built up in the buffer, etc.

Netflix Movie Viewer Status Info

Selecting Media info MessageBox shows the following window. While the Status Info focuses on what is currently happening, this view focuses on high-level information about the file and format.

Netflix Movie Viewer Media Info

The third option, Show Log File, opens up a text file in your chosen text editor. It has a lot of debug/trace output from your interactions with the player.

While that information is probably the same information in the overlay from the demo, it isn’t in a cool overlay format. I did a little Googling and came up with a tidbit from this Boxee forum post:

Also, for the curious (to see how many frames are dropped), you can view a diagnostic screen overlay in a Silverlight movie by hitting (i think this is right): control, shift, option, D
And you can change the quality settings by hitting: control, shift, option S

I’m pretty sure that Jeremy was doing something like that in the video however I wasn’t getting any results when I tried that combination. I do know that Scott later mentioned that there are several different skins for Silverlight and there are some that will show you data like what is in the overlay. He even showed one that graph the bitrate that was being downloaded and showed how it dipped to a much lower bitrate when you jumped to a new point in the video. Once the video started streaming at that lower rate, it would then try to bump up the bitrate to improve the viewing experience.

So, while I haven’t showed exactly the same overlay that was in the video, I did show a way to get to some behind-the-scenes data. If you know how to get the same transparent overlay, drop a note in the comments.

Popularity: 10% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General 

ACL Fest iTunes Music Sampler Download Codes

September 28, 2008

My nephew and sister-in-law went to ACL Fest yesterday and brought back a bunch of freebies. One of the items that they brought back multiples of was iTunes gift cards good for 25 free songs. Of course, the 25 songs are ‘A special collection of songs from this year’s artists.’ So, I used one card and downloaded my free songs. I now have 12 more cards that I have no use for. If you want a download code from one of the cards, leave a comment below with your email address and I will send one to you.

  • Above the Clouds by Slightly Stoopid on Chronchitis
  • All Around Me by Flyleaf on Flyleaf
  • Bitch, I Love You by Black Joe Lewis on Black Joe Lewis
  • Bubble Pop by Del the Funky Homosapien on Eleventh Hour
  • Caroline by The Belleville Outfit on Wanderin’
  • Come Home by Back Door Slam on Roll Away
  • Come to Me by South Austin Jug Band on Strange Invitation
  • Dirt In My Pocket by Joe Bonamassa on Sloe Gin
  • Guinevere by Eli Young Band on Jet Black & Jealous
  • Hold On by Hot Chip on Made In the Dark
  • Hurly / Burly by Man Man on Rabbit Habits
  • I’m Gonna Get There by Mike Farris on Salvation In Lights
  • Killing for Love by José González on In Our Nature
  • Love In Our Hearts by Electric Touch on Electric Touch (Bonus Track Version)
  • My Only Offer by Mates of State on Re-Arrange Us
  • New Resolution by Heartless Bastards on Stairs and Elevators
  • Oh Man! by Sybris on Into the Trees
  • Play The Role [Statewide Remix] by Bavu Blakes on Nobody Leavin
  • Politik Kills by Manu Chao on La Radiolina
  • Something Good This Way Comes by Jakob Dylan on Seeing Things - EP
  • Soul On Fire by Spiritualized on Songs In A&E
  • Stake Your Claim by Eli "Paperboy" Reed And The True Loves on Roll With You
  • Sultan by What Made Milwaukee Famous on What Doesn’t Kill Us
  • Time by Christopher Denny on Age Old Hunger
  • Traffic by Ben Cyllus on Cinnamon Matinee
  • The Way It Is by Nicole Atkins on Neptune City
  • The Wolf by Shooter Jennings on The Wolf
  • 100 Days, 100 Nights by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings on 100 Days, 100 Nights

Popularity: 18% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General 

Gustavugees

August 31, 2008

After a two week fun-filled vacation to Colorado, Six Flags Fiesta Texas and Schlitterbahn, immediately followed by the start of school, I was hoping to spend this Labor Day weekend catching up around the house. I should have known better given that it was hurricane season!

My wife has family down on the Texas coast near Beaumont and Port Arthur and we started receiving calls Thursday night from them looking for a place to stay. I’m calling them ‘Gustavugees’. The first group arrived Friday night and another group on Saturday. Right now we have an extra six people in the house and might get a seventh if my brother-in-law’s plant gets shut down.

So, rather than spending the weekend trying to catch up on things around here and try to get the kids in a routine for school, I am spending the weekend trying to stay on top of feeding and cleaning up after 11 people.

All-in-all, it isn’t too bad. Everyone is in good spirits. My 14yo nephew keeps my 10yo and 6yo sons busy. I haven’t hardly seen my 6yo niece and my 8yo daughter since they have been playing so well together. My wife and I have spent a fair amount of time with our 15mo grand-nephew. He is at that perfect age where he is really cute.

We do only have one bathroom but we’ve been through many holidays with more people here. We do have overflow given that my mother-in-law lives next door, another sister-in-law about two miles away and there are additional siblings in Bastrop with two houses.

The exodus around Hurrican Rita back in 2005 was much worse. It seems like everyone was pretty raw from the coverage around Katrina and were fearful of the results of Rita. Hopefully there won’t be any damage to their houses on the coast and everyone can get back home on Wednesday.

Popularity: 19% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General 

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