Mike Fahl

Wow. Impressive getting it firing on "all six cylinders" even though those six outputs are spread out across two cards, I guess since they're used in SLI mode, they really behave as one, single card. Thank's for sharing! Mike

Out plan is to do a limited beta in a week or two, and a public beta shortly after that. So stay tuned for this. We'll of course announce it right here. More details on features, videos etc to follow shortly. To answer some of your questions above ,our plan is to release version 6 "this spring" (that's as specific as I can be at this point). The current beta is fairly stable, though, and once the public beta is out, there's nothing stopping you for using that if you feel it's solid enough. Since this is a major upgrade, there will be an upgrade fee. The update can be done electronically, so nothing needs to be shipped. Again, more details to follow here on the forum and on our web site. Mike

H.264 is a fully supported codec in WATCHOUT. It's heavier to play back than MPEG-2, but offers quality improvements in some cases. If your loops play fine with H.264, by all means use that format. You may want to check back next week for more updates on this and other subjects. Mike

What projector parameters are you trying to control? There may be better options for control here than DMX, such as PJLink: http://pjlink.jbmia.or.jp/english/ You may still use the old method of direct IP addressing. Many prefer that for traditional applications. The naming method has advantages in fixed installations, when using multiple identical clusters, or together with WATCHPAX. Mike

You'll probably get more constructive answers if you submit a reproducible test case to support@dataton.com for investigation. It's really hard to speculate here on the forum without all the details and actual media/show file available. Mike

Are you referring primarily to video playback here? Mike

Welcome onboard! WATCHOUT does not create files with that name. Probably something Dropbox does. Note that the Cache folder can get rather large, and consists entirely of derived files, so if possible you may want to exclude it from what gets stored on Dropbox. I don't know if Dropbox support excluding folders somehow. Perhaps someone else can chime in here. Mike

No. But it's something we've been considering. Mike

Please wait a week and a half, and we'll have some more answers for you. Mike

UDP is by definition "unreliable". If the device supports TCP, you may want to consider using that instead. It sounds as if the device is controlled by serial data, and you use a MOXA to interface. I believe the MOXA handles TCP as well, which should be more "reliable". Mike

Please continue this discussion through support@dataton.com as we'd like to see if we can reproduce this problem in house. Mike

No, thatäs not normal. Can you still reproduce this problem on one set o computers? If so, can you reproduce it on another set of computers? If it only happen on a particular computer, my guess is that there's something wrong with the access rights to the folder where WATCHOUT stores the show. Have the computer been tweaked according to the manual (particularly the UAC settings)? What OS version is being used? Mike

VirtualBox is great for server applications (which is what Oracle intended it for, I guess), but does not support the kind of graphics APIs used by WATCHOUT. Fusio and Parallels are far better here (but not free). Mike

This will be solved in an upcoming version of WATCHOUT. Mike

Thanks Bill for your valuable insight, as always. For you Mac guys out there, the MacOS calculator also has a Programmer mode, allowing yo to add hex numbers. It doesn't seem to have a MOD function, but you can AND with FF instead, which does the same thing. Mike

It most likely should not be ’c’ ’u’ ’s’ ’t’ ’o’ ’m’ ’_’ ’1’ $00 unless the device expects to see all those quote characters. It should probably be custom_1$00 But the real PITA will be to get that pesky (and for IP comms totally redundant) checksum correct. Tell them they should design their protocol for their customers, not their engineers. ;-). Mike

You do know that you can use the "magnifying glass" cursor in the Stage window to zoom to any area, right? Are you talking about video here, or timelines in general? Stay tuned ;-) Mike

Weird how some companies cling to protocols originally developed for use over slow serial data lines back in the 90s. (Just guessing by the looks of things.) Me thinks it shouldn't have been too hard for them to provide an compatible, readable alternative protocol for use over IP. When running at Ethernet speed, cramming as much as possible into raw hex byte sequences with a checksum makes no sense. I would assume they have the computing horsepower in those projectors to deal with ASCII strings. Having such a readable version wouldn't stop them from also supporting the binary protocol, should they need to do so for backward compatibility. Internally, both dialects could map onto the same implementation, so there wouldn't be any significant overhead. I guess just the savings in support issues would pay for the developer. Sigh. Mike

Looks like a pretty convoluted protocol, originally devised to be sent over a serial line, and then just repurposed over Ethernet, while still keeping the (now redundant) checksum calculation, as well as byte "escape" sequences for bytes that aren't allowed within commands (i.e., to avoid framing issues on a serial data line). At least that seems to be the case, unless I'm overlooking something in here. Implementing it as WATCHOUT network command strings should be doable, but not trivial. Mike

When controlling a cluster from an external system, the computer you address becomes the cluster master. Mike

An alternative to external EDID Manager boxes (which add their own failure points) is the EDID management built into the drivers of some professional grade graphics cards (e.g., AMD FirePro). Doing it in the driver settings is a rather attractive solution. Mike

It's not clear what display name and cluster name you're using. The cluster names should be different for the two clusters. The display names should be same if you want the two clusters to run the same show file. I get the impression that your display name is a number. That may confuse the system Try making the cluster and display names alphanumerical (i.e., with a leading alphabetic character). Mike

Have you tried sending the command using a telnet client? If that works, the control system is probably doing something funky to your embedded escape sequences. Mike

Even then it won't scale it twice at runtime. Scaling is all collapsed to a single operation. Mike

WATCHOUT 5.5.2 will be released early next week. It improves compatibility with Windows 8.1. Let us know if that solves your problem. If not, please contact support@dataton.com for assistance. Mike