Tell HN: Watch YC Startup School Live | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Watch YC Startup School Live

justin.tv

75 pointswyday40 comments

I apologize for being harsh, but there has not been one major justin.tv stream that I have seen that has been enjoyable to watch. Seriously. Last year's startup school, this year's startup school, the wolfram alpha launch. It's either the audio cutting out, the video freezing, or both. I appreciate that the service is free and that they're working hard to get it to work, but honestly, this has happened so many times to the point where I'd just rather read people's summaries of the talks than trying to tolerate the choppy videos anymore. It's gotten a bit ridiculous.

I get they're a YC company, cool, but in following years, you should give an alternative, like UStream, etc, if the quality there is better. I try to avoid justin.tv as much as possible in general now.

The audio's "cutting out" because the mic level in the room is way too high. Notice how the video remains smooth while the audio stutters.

Honestly, as a user, that's not my problem.

Course it isn't. I'm just saying it's not Justin.tv you should be blaming, it's whoever set up the mic system.

I've been trying to watch and the video has been pretty choppy too.

Not trying to hate or anything, but I'm pretty bummed about this. I was really looking forward to watching it.

Just to follow up - the stream has gotten a LOT better - watching Chris Anderson now. Awesome!

I told the organizers here. Hopefully they'l start fixing this.

OK, now the video is stuttering so you can blame Justin.tv. It wasn't when I was watching earlier.

Sorry about the problems; they should be fixed now. We had a bad uplink at the site.

Worked great for me right up until the break for lunch.

They stopped recording. Why waste bandwidth broadcasting an empty room?

The quality of service issue had nothing to do with Justin.tv. The problem with streaming big events is that the connection is always saturated. In this case, the auditorium tech who was supposed to give us an independent line accidentally hooked us into the same connection as the wifi router.

Will recordings of the talk be posted online, preferably with slides attached? It would be wonderful if they were and i am sure that i'm not the only one that would appreciate it.

Watching inspiring talks like these are a real godsend for me, especially since i don't have the possibility to attend anything similar to this in real life. We don't have many web or startup related events here in Gothenburg (Sweden) and the availability of them online is as close as i come to meet these incredible people. :)

I agree and would love a link to the archive when it's created.

Also agree. I don't have time to watch this live today but would love to watch a recording sometime next week. Slides would be a nice bonus.

I miss Omnisio, it was perfect for talks accompanied by slides.

Here's the speaker list (from http://ycombinator.posterous.com/startup-school-final-speake...):

Chris Anderson (Editor in Chief, Wired Magazine)

Paul Buchheit (Founder, FriendFeed; Creator of GMail)

Jason Fried (Founder, 37signals)

Paul Graham (Partner, Y Combinator; Founder, Viaweb)

Tony Hsieh (CEO, Zappos; Founder, LinkExchange)

Mitch Kapor (Partner, Kapor Capital; Founder, Lotus)

Greg McAdoo (Partner, Sequoia Capital)

Mark Pincus (Founder, Zynga, Tribe, SupportSoft, Freeloader)

Biz Stone & Evan Williams (Founders, Twitter)

Mark Zuckerberg (Founder, Facebook)

looks like the order changed, here's a pic of the actual schedule that someone posted: http://img261.imageshack.us/img261/756/scheduleyo.jpg

Why is there only one monolithic video clip which can't be scrubbed to skip ahead or go backwards? http://www.justin.tv/clip/2493eb6f993f6e24

And why is it only 2 hours long?

Is there any place to watch the entirety of the day's talks?

Off-topic.

I love justin.tv, I have been following it since its early days of justin's stunt on lifecasting. I have seen the site morph over time. But the site in its current form is just very ugly UI. The chat widget is horrible and the bar on top is very out of place. They need to look at other live streaming site for decent UI design.

Will I / Can I find all the presentations somewhere? (not live)

The chat on that stream is as bad as youtube comments.

Is there any way to turn it off? For now I'm just using the "ignore" feature to block as many of those people as possible.

The fact that it's constantly moving is very distracting, and it adds so little value.

If you click the options gear-like icon, there's a "Hide Chat" option.

The chat widget is horrible. I resized the browser to get rid of it. They're also updating the "x Views ... " text below the video every once in a while, which is annoying.

agreed, needs a minimize button.

I used click user > ignore but it seemed to need reloading to work.

Cant blame justin.tv for the bad audio, of course.

I see a lot of comments about the video being choppy. I did not have this problem on my end. The video was fine for me in the Austin area. I have a ton of bandwidth in with bursting and had no choppy video whatsoever. The choppy video might be a bandwidth problem caused by your ISP overloading the node with other residential customers. I know from experience that some do this, and on Saturdays it can really slow things down.

I did notice the audio cut out but it was coming in as static so it might have been physical mic problem onsite vs. the actual audio delivery from the server to the client.

By the way YCombinator--GREAT JOB with this live broadcast, I loved it, it was GREAT!

Launch early and iterate!

I am in Dallas with 50mbps fios and I did notice many more problems with the archive version of the first talks. They improved the feed later in the day.

Great! Unfortunately the sound keeps cutting out.

I wish they would sort out the speaker's audio. The audience mics are fine.

So it is the speaker's mic? I was wondering the same, why the audience audi seems fine but the speakers are always falling out ...

Hopefully they'll just have video recordings posted online with the slides like previous years.

I agree. The audio kind of fails here...

Pretty sure we will. There's a camera in back, and I think it'll be on webcast.berkeley.edu when it's over.

P.S. I'm the guy whose computer was being used to present, who's been doing tech in the front.

Especially for those who don't have flash installed.

I'm on Linux, and even if I do have Flash installed, I vastly prefer regular video files since the performance of Flash is far from optimal on my slow CPU:s.

Zuckerberg's talk is tremendous so far. The guy's killing it. His grasp of details at the company is pretty darn impressive.

Video is really choppy, seems like there is a lack of bandwidth somewhere.

I got that at one point with the stream during the 37signals talk - rhythmic cutout, so assume its a network issue, on top of bad mic...

Talks hosted anywhere else?

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