First, the overall software architecture of my live relays is very modular. The CVD’s version used there is exactly the same (ver 3.5) used here on CG.com and all the relay work is done by the “TFD Proxy” module (on a separate server). That fact isn’t so obvious and people might be confused thinking that CVD has some special relay functionality in it.

The idea of “TFD Proxy” was born in my head (about a year ago) after witnessing numerous failures of official broadcasts based on the DGT’s software. We all have seen those followed by some lame excuses about “server overloads”. The truth is that by its original design their application it prone to scale badly. In addition, I haven’t seen any improvements in the way live broadcasts are presented for a very long time so my hope that somebody will address the issues was fading quickly.

One of the earliest appearances of “TFD Proxy” was in mid-march http://chesstuff.blogspot.com/2009/.... Later I kept improving it Viewer Deluxe chessforum and nowadays we have a grown-up version with a long list of advantages. Here is just a few:

1) It acts as a true proxy and only downloads from the server games which have been actually modified (with new moves, times, etc.). Shortly, if some 1000 users are watching via “TFD Proxy” the official server will only be bothered as if a single visitor is watching via DGT’s interface;

2) It is very robust and not so vulnerable to server’s downtime. For the duration of a live event the official servers can (and will – see above) become unstable. Most of the brief problems caused by the official servers are resolved by “TFD Proxy” and the latest states of the games will be available until something newer comes in. Shortly, the user’s experience should be much improved;

3) In very persistent situations, where one of the servers has been non-responsive for a long time, a meaningful message will be produced to notify the end user. The opposite is (oh, so familiar) the hanging/frozen application and the look and feel of “I have no idea what’s going on!”. In other words, in such situations no news would be definitely bad news.

Most users don't realize this but many of our live broadcasts are performed by an employee watching a board and typing in moves as he sees them appear. It's a crude, demanding, and error-prone process. That is the reason why we don't have live chess broadcasts except for a few times a year.

It is our opinion that the method of live chess broadcasting that is common these days needs to be vastly improved. The simple solution is that for high profile chess events, there needs to be two servers. The first server can be for the general public which can and probably will crash when a million chess fans all excitedly press "reload" continually on their browsers. The other server could be for sites like Chessgames which should be given the red carpet treatment. This secondary server could have a password or some other authorization scheme, and therefore only be accessed by a small group of authorized people. When we say that we should be given the red carpet treatment, that's not hubris--it's just common sense. We read from their server ONCE in order to disseminate those data to thousands of people. Therefore our request truly is thousands of times more important than the average request.

I'm running Firefox 3.5.5 and when using Chess Viewer Deluxe, I can only see part of the whole game. More precisely: I can see the 64 squares, the buttons on the bottom (except the "Board Colour Selection Buttons"), but I'm missing the "fourth column" of moves. I also can't see the date, the player's ELO rating...

Is there an adjustment I can make to see the whole thing? It works well in IE by the way, but I would really prefer sticking with Firefox.

My problem seems to have fixed itself!

All I did was use the 'Ctrl' button in conjunction with my mouse scroll wheel. This, as expected, made the text larger or smaller. However it also seems to have fixed the viewing window in CVD!! Cool!!

I didn't even have to go to some FF settings page or anything! Hmm... 'should have thought of that earlier, oh well!

I have my own chess blog http://chesswindows.blogspot.com where I'm already using MyChessViewer (I think). The feature is really great!

How can I use your CVD for me to be able to relay live transmissions of games?

I'm confused if it's MyChessViewer or your CVD that I'm using in my blog http://chesswindows.blogspot.com. The only thing that I'm sure of is that that viewer is really fantastic.

Yes, you are using CVD along with my Web publishing method. The latter is responsible for all the flexibility you get while posting and for bringing the PGN from inside of your post into the viewer (CVD) at runtime. As you already know, the main goal was to allow bloggers to focus on chess and chess-related content.

Broadcasting live games, on the other hand, is a completely different ballgame. In addition there’re two separate groups of problems depending on what is being relayed.

1) Organizing a live broadcast of a local tournament hosted by you (or your chess club) is not only possible but actually quite easy. It would rely on the same publishing method with just a few minor modifications. I’m going to post a user’s “How To” guide on my blog when I find enough time;

2) Broadcasting of a tournament hosted by someone else is a lot harder to do. Think of it as a re-transmission. A lot of information about the tournament, players, games and the actual moves (plus real-time clock) needs to be gathered and then translated into PGN so that CVD can understands it. All of that is done by a separate product called “TFD Proxy” (for more info see my post from Aug-29-09 above). As of current that product is not available since I’m looking into few possible ways of justifying my investments.