Roy of Superior Art Creations

It has been six months since the world largest hacker conference is over. I am referring to DefCon 15 of course, which was held on August 3 – 5, 2007 at the Rivera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The educational sessions where video-taped, converted to .MOV format (Apple) and pressed on 10 DVD-ROMs, which were then sold for $299 at the conference and for $499 thereafter.

Video DVD-ROMS on Google Video
I bought (pre-ordered) the DVD-ROMs at the conference and received the DVDs sometime in September 2007. I uploaded all of them to Google Video. You can find the links to the videos in this article and the three additional articles it refers to.

People were asking me constantly for the videos for download rather than on a video sharing site. Some people reported that the download of the original video files (yeah, it???s a trick and not visible to the general user hehe) was also not working for all of the files for unknown reasons. Google must have screwed something up, that???s why is Google Video still in Beta, right?!

Video DVD-ROM ISOs
So I spent countless hours to rip the DVD-ROMs, create nice ISO files out of them, then RAR and split them and finally ZIP and upload to Usenet. Ages later (no, I don???t have FiOS) were all ISOs finally up on the Internet. See this post of mine from November with all the details needed to download the ISOs.

Well, maybe because of the fast availability of the videos or maybe because the folks at the DefCon organizers crew got a bit smarter, I don???t know, but it also does not matter???

Getting to the Point, finally
What I want to say is that they already, only 6 months after the event, did they make the videos and audios available for download on the DefCon.org website. They created two separate RSS feeds, one for the videos and one for the audios. They posted it last Wednesday already, but I didn???t see it until today.

DefCon 15 Videos Feed (MP4)
DefCon 15 Audios Feed (MP3)

The videos are in .MP4 format and not .MOV, but those two formats are basically the same, with the only difference that Microsoft Media Player prefers MP4 over MOV (to say it nicely).

The two RSS feeds contain 122 videos and 122 audios in all. Here is once more the session listing in PDF format.

So, there you have it folks, watch the stuff online, download the whole ISOs or individual video recordings in MP4 or MP3 format, whatever pleases you.

122 + 3 = 125 – 122 = 3 … WTF?
There is only one question left for me. Their feeds contain 122 items each. That was also the total I got when I posted the first videos to Google Video. I said it myself in my blog post about it.

I came to 125 videos and corrected my previous statement that there are only 122 when I was done with uploading and made my last post with links to the individual remaining sessions. See the post here.

Now there are 122 videos in the official DefCon.org RSS feed. I don???t get it and I won???t start counting again. I leave this mystery for somebody else to solve.
If you check out my posts to the videos from last year, have a good look at them, because I provided also some other useful goodies beyond the DefCon 15 video and audio recordings.

Enjoy
Carsten aka Roy/SAC