VMworld

I had several folks ping me on when I would be publishing a nice consolidated list of VMworld Europe 2016 breakout sessions like I did for VMworld US. I took a look at the VMworld EU site last night and it looks like only 71 sessions have been published so far. In any case, I worked a bit of magic and was able to generate a list of playback URLs for the published session thus far. You can find the list on my Github repo: https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-eu-session-urls

UPDATED (11/01/16) - Just updated Github repo to include direct download URLs, grab them while you can 😀

Note: Similiar to the VMworld US based sessions, Media Site could make further changes which may render the URLs invalid or requiring additional authentication. I will try to update them as they change but so far, they seem to work without any issues 🙂

Thanks to Duncan Epping who shared the awesome news the other day in which ALL VMworld US 2016 sessions are now freely available to the general public regardless if you attended VMworld or not! This is definitely fantastic news and kudos not only to the VMworld team for doing this but also having it done right after a US holiday. To access the playback videos, you simply just need to register at http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/2016.html. Once you have done that, you will be taken to the page shown below with all the VMworld sessions since 2010.

UPDATE: With a bit more hacking around, I have now also created a second list of all the VMworld sessions with their respective download URLs. Please have a look at the Github repo for more info https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-session-urls

Although the site allows you to search and filter the content, I personally prefer just a simple list of the titles and direct playback URLs. In the past, I have scraped the VMworld site to build such a list and figure I do the same this year. Luckily, this year it was not as difficult as it was in the past as it looks like some of the data is JSON encoded which makes it trivial to parse into the format I want.

With that, I have published all 539 sessions with direct links to the playback URLs on the following Github project: https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-session-urls which you can easily bookmark and hopefully allow Google to also index for searchability in the future. Enjoy!

The recorded videos for the VMworld 2015 US sessions just went live last week and I just started to catch up on some of the sessions that I could not attend. Having only watched a couple of sessions, I was not a fan of the site navigation and the various pop-ups that were required to watch the videos. It was especially annoying when the browser session would time out and you had to go back and search for the video you were just watching. I felt it was difficult to browse through the content and be able to quickly launch a video without having to go through multiple clicks. I personally thought the user experience could be improved. Perhaps in the future, you can easily create "playlists" as you would for online music or videos and provide resume capabilities. In any case, instead of just complaining, I figured I try to provide a solution that could also benefit other VMworld attendees.

Note: I noticed that not all sessions were recorded and the ones listed below are the filtered sessions that included a video recording. If additional recordings are posted, I will update the list below.

I spent some time poking around the site and was able to hack together some pretty ugly scripts to extract out the VMworld sessions which contained a recording as not all sessions were apparently recorded. My initial goal was to link directly to the video which are hosted on vmware.mediasite.com but I found that even though I was able to pull the direct video URLs, there is a special authTicket param that is generated between the VMworld site and the video hosting site. This was not a static value based on the user's initial login and if you tried to access the video URL directly, you would be prompted to login to the video hosting site which does not accept VMworld credentials. Although it would have been nice to be able to login just once and be able to go straight to the videos, at least now you can easily browse through all the sessions which contain a recording and view with a single click. Make sure you carefully read through the pre-req!

For those of you who that did not attend VMworld, you will not be able to access the videos below, however you can however watch some of the public sessions that have published on the VMworld youtube playlist here.

Prerequisite:

• Must have attended VMworld 2015 US (valid login is required)
• Login to the VMworld site https://www.vmworld.com/schedulebuilder-login.jspa once (if session times out, be sure to re-login)

Once you have logged into the VMworld site (link above) once. You can then click on any of the links below and click on the media to play the recordings. I have broken the VMworld sessions by the six different tracks and here is a quick summary of the number of sessions with recordings.

• Cloud Native Applications (11)
• End-User Computing (65)
• Hybrid Cloud (36)
• Partner Exchange (0)
• Software-Defined Datacenter (250)
• Technology Deep Dives and Futures (12)