I previously wrote on how you could access the VMworld sessions via the Mobile App on a smartphone or tablet or via a PC through Schedule Builder. However those methods only allowed you to stream the content, not save it for offline viewing. Some people prefer the download method so they can copy it to a device for offline playback or just save their favorite sessions on their PC. Well that’s all changed as VMware has updated their VMworld page so you can now access the sessions through their main session playback page and either watch them or download them.

Don’t go to this page from the main VMworld page, it looks like an old page and doesn’t have the 2015 sessions yet. You have to click on US conference and then click the session playback link all the way at the bottom of the page which brings you to the page with the 2015 sessions added to it. Click the link and it asks you to verify that you were a paid attendee by putting in your name and email address, that seems odd as you would expect to login with your vmworld.com credentials instead. I tested this out and all it is really looking for is that your email address matches what you registered for VMworld with, I put in a different name and it still took it.

Once you are verified it will bring up the sessions list which you can select by track or search for sessions. You will have the option to watch a session or download it. If you select the option to download it a packaged download is created in .zip file format which contains the .mp4 video file of the session along with other files to support standalone playback of the sessions in a browser.

The size of these .zip files varies from around 250MB – 500MB depending on if it has video or not (just slides). Once downloaded you can extract the zip file which creates a bunch of files and folders, to start watching the session you can click the default.html file which will launch the playback in a browser using Silverlight or an alternate method (i.e. flash, java). Alternately you can go into the content sub-directory and launch the .mp4 video using your video player of choice.

Enjoy!