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.

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?”

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:

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.

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.

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.

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 2 Comments

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

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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.

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Antivirus XP 2008 and avxp2008.com

July 23, 2008

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Removing Antivirus 2009

I’ve been monitoring my traffic a fair amount over the past few weeks since I first published XP Antivirus 2008 and Antivirus 2009 are evil!. It looks like things were starting to taper off a little but has jumped up this week and in checking my Google Analytics Traffic Sources, I see that I am getting a bunch of hits from Google for the term ‘avxp2008′. Surprisingly, there were only 5 hits for that term, this site being one of them due to the mention in a comment from krisi on July 12th.

One of the search results had a vague mention of a web address of avxp2008.com. So I fired up Firefox and took a visit. While not quite as slick as the other site (see Antivirus 2009 and microsoft.browserprotectioncenter.com), they are definitely doing everything they can to try to lull you into their confidence and click on one of their download links. With most sites, you expect some kind of intermediate page once you click a download link where they will either provide some additional details or instructions or gather some information from you. Not here. They try right off the bat to get you to download a .exe file (AntivirusXP2008Installer.exe) in the hopes that you will click the Run button and install it.

If you are already infected, you should take a look at Removing Antivirus 2009 - Round 3 for how I was able to remove it from my Dad’s computer. In the next day or so I hope to post a quick article on how to avoid getting infected in the first place.

If anyone has any other advice or suggestions, please leave a comment for others to benefit from.

Popularity: 31% [?]

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Antivirus 2009 and browserprotectioncenter.com

July 8, 2008

This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Removing Antivirus 2009

If you have been infected with the Antivirus 2009 spyware/malware, I’m sure that you have noticed that all of the links point to microsoft.browserprotectioncenter.com. Hopefully you haven’t visited the site and/or purchased their spamware/spyware/malware solution. So for the curious out there, here are some screen shots of what you would find on their site.

A couple of things to note:

All of the thumbnail/small images below are linked to the original images on my Flickr account. They DO NOT link to the original page. So you can click the images to view the full-size image on Flickr without fear.
They obviously spent a fair amount of money on making a site that is easy on the eyes and very inviting. I’ve seen plenty of legitimate businesses with hideous sites.
If you go to microsoft.browserprotectioncenter.com with Firefox, you get redirected to the Internet Explorer 7 download page. I guess they really want you to run IE so that they can take advantage of the less secure browser.
While I feel that I am providing a bit of a public service by publishing all of this information, the sad fact is that they could very easily set this whole scam up again at a different site/address/URL.

Here is what lives at browserprotectioncenter.com:

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C# using Directive

July 7, 2008

Scott Hanselman has a new post that caught my eye: Back to Basics - Do namespace using directives affect Assembly Loading? In that post he points to an interesting StyleCop rule that caused him to do a double-take: SA1200: Using Directives Must Be Placed Within Namespace.

According to the StyleCop post, there are three things to consider when deciding the placement of the using directive:

There are subtle differences between placing using directive within a namespace element, rather than outside of the namespace, including:

1. Placing using-alias directives within a namespace eliminates compiler confusion between conflicting types.

2. Placement of using directives can affect how and when the .Net Framework will load referenced assemblies.

3. When multiple namespaces are defined within a single file, placing using directives within the namespace elements scopes references and aliases.

According to Scott:

However, the second rule in the post said:

"However, placing the using statements [Ed. Note: They mean "directives"] within a namespace element allows the framework to lazy load the referenced assemblies at runtime. In some cases, if the referencing code is not actually executed, the framework can avoid having to load one or more of the referenced assemblies completely. This follows general best practice rule about lazy loading for performance."

This stopped me in my tracks. This rocks the very bedrock that my knowledge of the CLR stands on. I’m like, NO WAY, and then I oscillated back and forth between denial and acceptance. Then, I settled on denial. I don’t buy it. A using directive is for aliasing and is a kind of syntactic sugar. Ultimately the IL is the same. Assembly loading won’t be affected as the assembly manifest doesn’t change.

I have always put my using directive outside the namespace declarations. That was the way everyone did and to me it looked better. Every now and then I would see a code sample that placed the using directive inside the namespace declaration and it always made me wonder why you would do that.

Going to the MSDN Library, we find the following for the using Directive:

The using directive has two uses:

Create an alias for a namespace (a using alias).

Permit the use of types in a namespace, such that, you do not have to qualify the use of a type in that namespace (a using directive).

Granted, this page appears to only concern itself with how the directive is used, but you would think that if there were any possibility that position would affect the loading of classes that it would be called out in the Remarks section.

Scott was right to question the statement. He created quick test that seems to bear out the fact that position of the using directive does not affect the loading characteristics of the code. In addition, several people in the comments performed similar tests, including checking the generated IL code and came up with the same conclusion. He is waiting for some official feedback from someone on the compiler team.

So now I know that the only real reason to put the directive inside the namespace is to avoid conflicts, which I haven’t had so far.

Side note: Did you know that there is a difference between the using Directive and the using Statement? I never really paid attention or made the association that they were the same word but differentiated by context.

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What is the difference between a computer virus and spyware?

July 6, 2008

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Removing Antivirus 2009

During this whole ordeal with my Dad’s Antivirus 2009 issues, a question that came up a couple of times that I didn’t have an answer to was "How come I need an anti-virus application and an anti-spyware application?" I’m vaguely aware of the history of each and how they evolved separately but I though that a quick refresher on each was in order.

Here are some definitions culled from Wikipedia:

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Removing Antivirus 2009 - Round 3

July 5, 2008

This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series Removing Antivirus 2009

Despite my best efforts in XP Antivirus 2008 and Antivirus 2009 are evil! and XP Antivirus 2008 and Antivirus 2009 - Round 2 it appears that there might still be some residual infection on my Dad’s computer:

Last evening preparatory to shut down, that blue screen we saw last week-end popped up with the standard msg about having to shut down. But this time, instead of going through the motion of shutting down and restarting, the system froze. Finally pulled the plug and brought the system up in the admin account and started SpyBot. It produced zero hits.

My latest round of advice is to try the following:

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SIGG Can’t Keep Up With Water Bottle Demand

July 5, 2008

Over the past year or so, due to the publicity over bottled water, I’ve gradually become aware of movement toward personal water bottles that are designed to last longer, not contain harmful chemicals, not leak, etc. I like the idea of having personal water bottle for my kids. It is a great way to get them away from bottled water, soft drinks and juice boxes. So during the round of May birthdays at our house, after some research, I decided to give SIGG water bottles as gifts.

I found some good designs at a couple of local retailers but was having some trouble finding the specific design my son wanted. I had been to the SIGG online store in May and went back there to see if I could find the specific design there. I ran into this at the MySIGG online catalog:

Due to the incredible demand for SIGG bottles, we are forced to close down the MySIGG shop. We are also unable to supply any other Internet business for Sigg Brand. Our Swiss factory is working around the clock to produce and ship more bottles to us, but the demand has currently and for the near future - exceeded the supply.

That is pretty crazy. They have been silently making their water bottles for a 100 years and now they can’t keep up with demand. I bet they are pretty excited to finally see the shift toward their product.

In the meantime, here are some retailers they recommended you check out:

In addition to SIGG, you may want to check out Klean Kanteen. They are marketing a stainless steel personal water bottle (as opposed to SIGG’s aluminum version).

Anyone have a stories to share regarding their experiences with either brand? I personally like the new SIGGs that I’ve gotten the kids. First and foremost, they don’t leak. Second, since it is their own personal bottle, they like keeping up with it and actually like drinking out of it (more water, less juice!).

Popularity: 26% [?]

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XP Antivirus 2008 and Antivirus 2009 - Round 2

June 29, 2008

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Removing Antivirus 2009

OK, so it was a bit premature to declare victory over the XP Antivirus 2008 / Antivirus 2009 issues that my dad was facing. Here is the email I got this morning:

I ran the full scan over night which produced one more critical item and over a hundred cookies which were removed. At first it seemed like there were no problems. I switched to the non-admin account and started getting the same screens we had viewed last night. Still in the this partition, I cranked up the full scan and after running a while the interference got worse by displaying two or three new screens predicting even more dire consequences. And, periodically going into what appears to be a rebooting of the system following which the scan proceeded as normal.

I did a little more research using some of the keywords from last night’s screen shots and ran across this xp antivirus 2008 post in the Windows Live OneCare Anti-Virus forum. Looks like people started running across variations of the virus/spyware back in February. Since then there have been over 42,000 views and over 80 replies with varying degrees of success. Most people referred to a post by ’shecut’ on page 2 as having been successful. I decided that was what we were going to try.

We got on the phone and connected via Copilot again. Again, it was immediately apparent that there was something going on with his computer. Check out these screen shots:

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How to view the Netflix Silverlight diagnostic stats

ACL Fest iTunes Music Sampler Download Codes

Gustavugees

Antivirus XP 2008 and avxp2008.com

Antivirus 2009 and browserprotectioncenter.com

C# using Directive

What is the difference between a computer virus and spyware?

Removing Antivirus 2009 - Round 3

SIGG Can’t Keep Up With Water Bottle Demand

XP Antivirus 2008 and Antivirus 2009 - Round 2

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