Claude.Rivet

Hello JFK, In this case it would be 6.3.1 and 6.2, the problem happens with still images or videos. However, we think we found the culprit and will be testing further tomorow to confirm but it looks like it's a license key issue, the hardware dongle itself. Changing it seems to have solve the problems but we barely tested at the end of our troubleshooting day. I will post the confirmation after the tests. Thanks for helping!

Hello guys, We are currently installing a new display computer and are stumbling upon issues and while we are still testing and hunting for solutions I would like to dive in the collective minds for solutions. x299 (MSI raider) i7 8 cores w9100 32GB ram (4channel of 8GB) on board network adapter (1Gbps) Win10 pro (we are trying win10 entreprise LTSB atm) win10 tweak list applied Problems: -1- some medias just do not show up on the display computer, we tried solid and a jpeg. The same media that was not showing can start showing after a reboot and a new media was affected. The reason we haven't tried other media is number -2- -2- file transfer do not complete, it either freezes on a file and gives us a caching error. Solutions tried and current troubleshoot: -1- ran memtest86, RAM is fine -2- ran iPerf3, network is fine -3- tried different disk and different storage tech (ssd, nvme, HDD), no difference -4- tried the same sessions on a different display machine which was then working flawlessly -5- tried to install win7 pro. It doesn't work as x299 and the new i7 are not supported and external drivers won't install -6- we are currently trying win10 entreprise LTSB with the tweak list, will update post with result Considerations With win7 phased out and with new hardware being unsuported anyways we are entering a phase of uncertainty with Watchout where we will embark on multi day testing not knowing if it's our hardware, the driver versions, a faulty component, a tweak, an addon that causes the problem. I guess it was always the case but not at this level, troubleshoot will always take place but having a media server that doesn't officialy and rigorously support the current OS in place is tricky at best. For years we had the win7pro fallback, it doesn't apply anymore and win10 obviously has issues, for many users. It would greatly help to be able to rule out the OS as the possible culprit when having problems. Does Dataton has any OS plan for the upcomming year? Do you guys ever plan on moving to linux and skip all the windows nonsense? Do you plan on releasing a fully win10 compliant Watchout? Thank you for the upcomming help and for the great product, it might give us headaches recently but it's still our favorite one regards

Hello, A few things to consider: -Update win7 to the latest service pack (sp3 I think) -If given the choice pick faster clock over number of cores, Watchout uses 2 cores mainly, it is a 32bit app also. Capture cards and external control can lead to more than 2 cores being used but at a fraction of the first 2. Since you work with HAP speed, not concurrent processing, is important, the GPU works, not the CPU. -Update your BIOS, M.2 drives are constantly getting performance boost and stability improvement trough those, they are recent and still being tweaked by BIOS vendors. -If you have the W9100 you need the S400 sync board or else you do not framelock, which leads to your problem of having only two computer in a cluster performing badly, if you were framelocked they would ALL perform badly (or not) the exact same way on the exact same frame. just having an S400 board and connecting it is not enough, you need to configure it if the AMD graphic card advanced settings. First you define a master and lock each of the card output on that timing master for each computer in your cluster, for the master computer it means choosing input 1 as the sync source for example and then slaving each other output to the output 1 and then setting the RJ45 connections to that master, then in each other computer you set the receiving RJ45 as the master and slave your outputs and the outputing RJ45 (for the daisy chain) to it. You also need to identify in Watchout which output is the sync chain master. That being said I encountered the same issues you are having. If the payback is choppy under the same circumstances every playback it is usually because of your file bandwidth (or some other bottleneck). HAP bandwidth is variable, very variable, so some frame might require 800MB/s while other demand 1.4GB/s. After some testing we came to the conclusion that smal gradients where the issue; fire, smoke, fancy light bubbles, HAP has a hard time encoding those or rather keeping the bandwidth low. Noise, if not blurred, doesn't display this issue, it is always as soon as small gradients are found (a sky is not an issue, it is a gradient but it is big). The only way to reduce the bandwidth is by reducing the file size (resolution), the only painful way I found to figure out by what exact amount is by encoding the file with FFmpeg and watching the cmd line output as it encodes to spot the highest bandwith peak, if I peak at 1.8GB/s and my storage is giving out 900MB/s max then I know I have to reduce the size by 50% so HAP encodes it within my hardware spec. I am currently writing an encoder, an FFmpeg interface actually, that amongst other tracks your HAP bandwith trough the encode process and auto resize the file in a second pass if the first one leads to frames encoded at a superior bandwidth that the system can take. Other than that I don't know of any way to manage it in an automated manner. A note about encoding in chunks, if you plan on playing back concurent files do not encode in chunk as it allows bigger files to be played back, yes, but at the expense of limiting the amount of concurrent files that can be played back. If I encode in chunks I can play 4 HD files before stuttering happens, without chunks I can play 56 HD files before it does. The difference is huge. However I can play back larger files when encoding in chunk than without, it is a tradeoff. As a general rule of thumb you want to encode in a number of chunks equal to half the number of cores on the playback computer so that you have no issue crossfading between files. That's what I see for now, hope it helps.

Use virtual displays, you lose the warping, which is a shame, I'd really like to warp the show as a whole rather than by screen but otherwise it would do the trick. Other than that you basically seem to be referring to what Watchout calls task, which are timelines you can start and stop independently of one another, each task can be layered according to the rule it is set to (always above, according to list order...).

Until Watchout supports generative and procedural content and input processing these tracking things will remain tricky to play with, high interactivity does require much work when working with playbacks. Other than that Watchout has no input processing whatsoever, so damping and prediction must be done before the input is sent to whatchout and Watchout doesn't give feedback; positions, orientation, rotation, all manipulated parameters or coordinate must be tracked in the external software as you cannot query Watchout for the infos (as far as I know, would be happy to be wrong). That being said, there are many packages out there that could manage your interactivity and digest the input before sending them to Watchout. Then, color changes, rotations, media follow, position based playback triggers, are all doable. I am not sure I should list them here as some are from competitors but a quick search on google should give you a few results. One last thing, Watchout doesn't latch, it starts, stops or pause, and it doesn't auto generate channels in case you trigger the same timeline twice (at best you will restart the video) playing back a video for as long as a note is pressed for example is not possible, latency and lack of enveloppes amongst other make it unaesthetic. Watchout is a superb software but as far as interactivity goes it is pretty limited right now. You might also consider a VRPN server for easy interfacing with Watchout. https://github.com/vrpn/vrpn/wiki Also, Blacktrax uses Optitracks technology which is now available for everyone and quite impressive. Here is their VR application page (you feed a screen rather than an helmet but it's the same package): http://optitrack.com/motion-capture-virtual-reality/

First things first: Select wireframe preview, try Still crashing? First possible culprit is the medias, Watchout can deal with a great variety of format, just not all at the same time, general rules of thumb: -HD = HAP or .m2v (mpeg2 video stream, no audio) or .m4v (mpeg4 video stream, no audio) -Non-Standard resolution under HD = HAP or .m4v -Non-Standard resolution above HD = HAP -Transparency = Hap_Alpha -Images = png -images transparency = png 32bit -audio should be .wav -HAP, each side must be divisible by 4 -.m2v, each side must be divisible by 16 -.m4v, each side must be divisible by 2 (Watchout will still try to play back the file if it doesn't respect those divisible but problems will arise) -Separate audio and video, they should play back from 2 tracks Still crashing? Depending on the medias you might tax some part of your computer, storage is usually the main culprit, you are playing back from HD or SSD? You are entering computer specific issues, in the manual there is a whole section on how to configure Windows for Watchout, go trough and do. Do not use Watchout like you would use Word for example, it doesn't play well with software loaded and feature enabled computers, the simpler the system the better. Go on the forum posts about win10, I think there is a sticky about it, read and do. Start with that and come back

M.2 drives are actually the way to go in display computers but there are a few things to keep in mind 1- Number of lanes: PCIe bus have 1GB per lane of bandwidth (roughly), it is important that you do your bandwidth calculation before building your computer and it is important you manage those lanes appropriately else you will have less performance from M.2 drives than from a normal SSD. Some slot share their bandwidth with the M.2 slot, if you install your graphic card in slot 1 for example and your M.2 drive in M.2 slot 1 they will compete for bandwidth and dramatically reduce your performance. Your motherboard documentation should layout how lanes are distributed. That also brings us to RAID1 M.2 drives, it's a very bad idea on most motherboard for the reason stated, however some PCIe card can fit more than 1 M.2 drives and raid them, this is the way to go, this way you have dedicated lanes for your storage because you aren't using shared lane slots. That also means you will have to reduce overall bandwidth usage for your machine, distributing your lanes appropriately becomes very important. 2- M.2 drives are NVMe SSDs, the one with insane performances at least, which mean they are not secure or stable and it means the performances will degrade with time, after 3years I get about 2/3 of my original bandwidth on my Samsung 950pro. It is important you have a backup system in place, personally I use an internal hidden drive and using one scripted keyboard key I backup my M.2s on this drive whenever my show reach a milestone in programming. SSD fails, they will, it's not a matter of "if" it's a matter of "when", be prepared. 3- Do NOT use an M.2 drives for your system, the CPU overhead is not worth it and in my experience it is far less stable, don't ask me why I still haven't figured that out but IF the motherboard can boot from M.2 corruption is more likely to occur on system drives than data ones. 4- HAP is ultimately limited by your drive bandwidth but you have to make sure there is still bandwidth available for the exchange between the graphic card (HAP is decoded by your GPU) and your drive and the system memory, so 5GBps becomes 20GBps because you use your lanes to read from drive, send to the card and read from the card in main memory where Watchout renders the scene for example, if your source is an input card count 4GB per HD input (according to Datapath documentation). That's about what I can think of right now but basically using M.2 is not a simple switch like going from HDD to SSD, your need to manage ressources. hope this helps

Hello guys, I posted the issue on Github and they answered saying it was a Watchout issue and to contact Dataton. So it IS a known issue, and it IS in the hands of Dataton, this is almost good news as it means we will soon see a dramatic increase in playback performance as soon as this is fixed. Thanks for the help looking forward to the fix regards

Still haven't got any reply from Dataton so I guess I won't get to test that. So basically Hap seems to be decoded in the CPU embeded GPU rather than on the AMD W9100 which only reserves the amount of memory needed for the frame buffers (or whatever it is named). If I used two output it goes from 302-304MB to 600ish and at 6 outputs the amount of reserved memory is around 1.8GB, so GPU-Z does report some stuff correctly now maybe some usage is not monitored and my assumptions are wrong but it does look like WO only takes ram on the GPU for it's output and decodes HAP elsewhere. My guess is if that get fixed (I will post on hap forums in case the problem is in the decoder) we will see a dramatic increase in playback performance as we will now use to pro card with 16GB of ram availlable for HAP decoding. Anyways, thanks for the help, hope to see some fix at some point. regards

50+files simultaneously, introduced one by one with 1second gap between. I will ask support, thank for the tip!

Yes, this is a recipe for disaster, from experience. However, why not use a dual boot system, one for watchout, clean, and one for other stuff. A local clonezilla with two images accessible at boot via an F key is also a solution if the switch from Watchout to other stuff is rare.

Here is the screenshot, long story short HD007 and HD008 are the 55th and 56th files added, usually is starts at around 51st and 52nd. http://imgur.com/a/FZUY4

Is it possible HAP files are decoded with the intel GPU rather than the amd pcie card? It would explain getting identical results from an 8GB and 16GB machine and the GPU-Z reading.

It keeps teasing me with it's cheap 6x outputs, I wouldn't run shows on them but I could see a small system for museum driving 6 output from one cheap computer playing back one HD stream per output (2x HD per output max when crossfading between content), facilitating management and saving space. Would be nice to know what results you guys got with it. Thanks, regards

Good day, I am in the process of building new stations, I will post results and testing procedures when I am done as requested in another thread when I am done. However while testing HAP playback I stumbled upon an issue where my production computer was running out of video memory (as stated in the message panel). At 8GB I was not so surprised as I was playing 50x HD files however when playing those same files on my display computers I got the same message even though I have 16GB of video memory available. My production preview was set to video as thumbnail. Surprised I ran GPU-Z on my display and production computer while playing back those same files. I also ran AMD system monitor and Windows ressource monitor to get a bigger picture of what was happening. I logged to file when possible. GPU-Z reports a maximum of 304MB used on card... memory clock was topping and so was core clock but memory didn't seem to be even remotely used, telling me either GPU-Z was badly reporting or only the output frame buffer is reserved (HD 249MB) plus a little overhead and therefore GPU ram was indeed not used at all as all compositing was done prior. So why the video memory issue then? So I am getting this error where Watchout runs out of video memory even though all tells me there is still much memory left. Even if all meters are wrong (which is a possibility after all) there is still the odd result of running out of memory with the very same amount of data on both an 8GB card and 16GB one. Somehow I have a feeling I have a lot of unused power there . side NOTE: encoding HAP in chunk is not always a good idea btw, it helps to play back huge files but also greatly limit the amount of files you can play back simultaneously, in my production computer as soon as I play back 2 HD files encoded in 4 to 8 chunks (8cores processor) the playback as issues, with no chunks I reach 50x HD files. So be carefull about chunks, it helps, but only for huge files and only if you play back a minimum of file at the same time also, it is not the solution to my issue, it has been tested.