GTR Webcast
 

Greater Toronto Regional is happy to announce a second year webcast run by Discovery Channel (Canada). Last year they did a wonderful job interviewing people and filling space between matches. There were some issues with our fine American neighbors however in that there were blackouts in some areas. I have been working with Discovery Channel and I believe they have the issue resolved. With help from my gracious friends here on CD I believe that all were able to see last years archives.

I am attaching the links to last year for others to test. I was not able to test the mid states or the western US. Please email/PM me if you try and are unable to access. Here's looking to another great year with FIRST. Remember to drive it like you stole it but be sure that it is in OVERDRIVE.


Hi Steve;



Can you see if any folks you know in the U.S. can see our archived webcast from last year?
I believe we’ve been able to take the Canadian geolock off..



FIRST Robotics, Greater Toronto Regionals - March 30

http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/web...nals-march-30/



FIRST Robotics, Greater Toronto Regionals - March 31

http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/web...nals-march-31/



FIRST Robotics, Greater Toronto Regionals – bonus features

http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/web...xtra-coverage/



FIRST Robotics, Greater Toronto Regionals – bonus features II

http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/web...s-first-robot/



Cheers,



Peter
__________________

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unavailable for Israel :(

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I will see what I can do.

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"Sorry, the video you are trying to watch is only available in Canada."

From Virginia

Re: GTR Webcast
 

Thanks for the reply. I just sent another note to see if we can remedy this. I will keep people posted here when I receive an update. Others please keep checking your area.

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Same from Metro Detroit.

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what if discovery channel were to set up a proxy that users could connect to in order to watch videos, to get around the geo-lock?

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again from new jersey

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Think they could also make a special exception for France as well Steve? :) Nothing working here, though I was not expecting it to in the first place.

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I wonder if the Discovery people would consider adding someone from the CD community to do play-by-play or colour commentary?

I'd actually be really interested.. haha

Maybe Karthik would too?

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Cant watch a thing in Grand Rapids metro Michigan

-Mike

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I believe an alumni from Team 1547 Waldo named Amanda did something like that in 2005 or 2006.

That was a good production! Hopefully this year's will top that one!

(Btw, doesn't seem to work here in CT)

Re: GTR Webcast
 

Ok everyone, I have just spoken to Peter again and explained that we want world wide coverage and listed a lot of our problem areas. They thought that the Geolock was off and don't understand why it is being blocked. He has a team working on it now.

When I hear back from him I will post and we can retest with the CD community. Thanks for helping us out, we hope to fix soon. Good thing is that there are 4 weeks to resolve this issue.

PS: Jeff I hope that we can get you hooked up so that you can see 188's awesome robot in action. I know that you are going through withdrawal in France.

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All the links at the top have been truncated with periods in the middle. It is possible that Geolock IS off for all the FIRST stuff, but we're all getting redirected to discovery's default program (JetStream for me), which would be geolocked.

Re: GTR Webcast
 

I am able to get the links as are people in Texas, Maryland, Florida, Michigan and a few others. We are not quite sure why they don't work in some areas. Peter is looking into it with his team.

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I just reposted the links because I also got directed to the wrong place. It seems to go to the right place now.

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I can now access the site and get the option to view the clips but they don't begin streaming when I select them.

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Did you install the software?

Re: GTR Webcast
 

Just an FYI to those trying to test these links, I had to use IE to access them not Firefox. You also have to click the message to install Silverlight if you do not already have it.


After taking care of those 2 things it worked fine for me here in MN.

Re: GTR Webcast
 

Yes after installing the software and trying it with Firefox and IE, though it may be having issue with the school system's proxy.

Edit: I'll check it when I get home since it appears our proxy is having issues.

Re: GTR Webcast
 

great to hear this news, this is the regional taht i look forward to on webcasts for the past couple of years

just a few quick questions

1. Will the music be faded out like last yer's webcast

2. Will this be broadcasted at all on the actual Canadian Discovery TV channel, and if so, will it be in HD?

3. any chance more teams or indivisuals can get together from the US and try to do something liek this for some of the US regionals? That would be really nice,

I would love a color comintator, unfortunitly, it probally will not be Karthik (in my opinion, the John Madden or Dick Vitael of FIRST Announcing and Analisys). because he will be busy being the MC as far as i know

Re: GTR Webcast
 

1. I think so. I think Steve said in last year's thread that the music was faded out because Discovery doesn't have a license to rebroadcast it as a for-profit corporation, whereas NASA can rebroadcast it via their webcasts. The music we heard was background picked up by the camera's mic, while on the NASA broadcasts it is directly fed into the webcast.

2. Substantial amounts of highlights and background have found their way onto daily planet in the past (they had a big follow-along piece with 188 in 2006), but actual live coverage isn't likely.

For HD, I proposed last year that one team find an HD camcorder, place it so it can see an entire field, record every match, and torrent the whole thing in a compressed format afterwards. Many teams without cameras of their own would probably appreciate this.

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It's working in PA.

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Links worked fine from Texas. I'm also using Firefox and didn't have to bother installing Silverlight or anything. When it asks you to please install Silverlight, there's a link that says "Watch the video without Silverlight" which brought up a standard streaming WMV for me. You might need Silverlight for the actual live streams during the regional, of course. I don't know that either option is terribly appealing to the Linux crowd, of course...

Also, not to put words in the mouth of the Discovery Channel IT folks, but it might be useful for people with non-working connections to list their internet providers as well. You can generally figure this out by opening a command prompt and running a traceroute. So something like "tracert www.yahoo.com" then the first entry with an actual domain name on the right side is usually your provider.

Re: GTR Webcast
 

I'm not certain this is really that productive a use of a team's time and recording equipment. In years past, the "Let's fit everything into this shot" view of the field just hasn't been that useful, as robots end up pretty small and you can't really see much of what's going on. While the video editors do occasionally make strange shot choices or miss some of the action, I'd prefer getting a clear picture of 90% of the action to getting a vague picture of 100% of it.

I'll admit the nature of this year's game problem makes it more amenable to the overview shot, but I think we really usually get our money's worth out of the video producers.

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It's working from Grand Rapids, Mi now.

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Working fine for me now in VA using firefox and IE, with and without Silverlight. Guess it was the school proxy server.

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I'm getting it just fine in central VA.

EDIT: Whoops, thats redundant. my bad.

Re: GTR Webcast
 

Ah, which is why I said HD. A 1080p wide shot of the field actually gives enough detail to read team numbers. As proof, I submit this panorama I took of a field in 2005. It's 1920 pixels wide and fewer than 1080 pixels high, to given an idea of the kind of quality you'd expect from an HD stream. Judging by some HD content I've seen online, you could probably fit in about 10 very high quality matches per gigabyte using H.264, and teams would be able to only download the matches that interested them.

As for the use of time, the guy camping beside the camera could do all the normal scouting activities and push a button before/after every match (the beauty of this plan is that it requires zero during-match work). Compressing/uploading it would probably take awhile, but not a prohibitive amount.

Edit: And to stay marginally on topic, the links all work for me perfectly now.

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All's well in Ohio...

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I can get the links in Detroit now too.

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Folks, if I could get you to test again if you were not able to receive before. Please note the message below and any help would be welcome:

Hi Steve;

Is it possible for us to find out the IP addresses of the folks that are being wrongfully geoblocked? Our video guy Telly says “I am pretty sure this is something that gets dealt with on a per IP address basis. ” I.e. this hopefully is only a few people having trouble and not indicative of the web world at large. Anyway, that info would help us guarantee we’re offering unblocked video on our end,

Peter

Re: GTR Webcast
 

Works for me. I clicked the picture of my team's robot and after installing the right plug in the stream played without a hitch :)

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For those that didn't catch my earlier post, you can get your IP by running a trace route to some known website. Probably hitting the watch.discoverychannel.ca site would be most useful. To run a traceroute, open a command shell by hitting your start button, clicking on "run" and then typing "cmd" for XP/2000 or "command" for anyone still running 98. In the command shell you'd type:

tracert watch.discoverychannel.ca

After you hit enter it prints out the path from your computer to the website. Your actual IP that's exposed to the world is likely the first with some sort of name on the right side, but copying the first 4-5 lines of the trace is pretty much guaranteed to get your IP address unless you're in some huge highly layered corporate network or are hiding from the authorities behind several proxy servers. In which case you stopped reading at about the second sentence.

Also, I'm blithely assuming that the linux users out there know how to do this already.

Re: GTR Webcast
 

You will notice that I have added an application to my signature to help you find out your IP and provider. I hope this helps.

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it's even working for me now, here in Israel

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Works fine on my DSL at home and the school systems network.

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I have a lot of people that now can receive the links. This is a last chance to check. If all goes well then Discovery Channel will be broadcasting GTR for all the world to see.

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Is this year's event going to be available to watch from the US live? And if so, Discovery Canada is going to need to get us a link for this year's material. The link on the NASA webcast page has a geolock on it.

Edit: I went to discovery.ca and found this: http://www.discoverychannel.ca/shows....aspx?sid=7826
Looks like the webcast starts tomorrow at 9am!

Re: GTR Webcast
 

I have just spoken with the Discovery Channel people and they will be checking on the geolock. We may have been given the wrong URL but I now have what I believe is the correct one. I was told that they may do some streaming today once set up. Please check this URL and let me know if it works:

http://www.ctvdigital.com/discovery/first/player.html

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It is working here in Grand Rapids, Mi! Well, I can get to the webpage and the advertisement plays then nothing else in the player, but I assume that's fine since the webcast is supposed to start tomorrow.

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Same here for me in Rochester, NY.

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The main discovery page says it starts at 9am EST, yet it is 9:30 and they are still playing info about the lunar eclipse :(

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Works in Rhode Island!

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Nevermind, works in internet explorer.

PS, I wrote a gameday-like thingy:
http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~ahare/first.html

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Ditto Bongle. Works for me in Internet Explorer, not in Firefox. Not huge since I'm obviously running windows, but it might be affecting the Mac-addicts among us.

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Yea i'm just getting the looping advertisement they had up yesterday... i'm certainly not seeing any robots.

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It works fine for me using IE6 and windows media player. Plays a 30 second pontiac ad, then goes into the webcast.

Using Windows XP SP2, WMP10, internet explorer 6, viewing through the iframe at my gameday thingy.

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thats the problem not everyone has windows XP (and i'm glad I don't)...

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It's got its problems, but I'm glad I have it today!

Have you tried just the stream link?
http://www.ctvdigital.com/discovery/first/first.asx

I just had success opening this in both WMP and Media Player Classic (which I believe is based on VLC). It plays the pontiac ad, then moves on to the actual stream. So it appears to not be a browser problem.

Edit:
Here's another webcast link you could try:
http://mfile.akamai.com/45882/live/r...asx?bkup=23761

Re: GTR Webcast
 

Nice crisp video in a moderate screen size but audio crackles a little.

-Mike