Mike Fahl

Either way should work fine. I.e., using multiple concurrent clients or going through some intermediary, which then coordinates and forwards to WATCHOUT as appropriate. Mike

You may want to try this example, which does something quite similar, reading from a local file: http://academy.dataton.com/recipe/editable-text this recipe has some further details on the Flash sandbox, which tends to get in the way sometimes: http://academy.dataton.com/recipe/circumventing-flash-sandbox Mike

For display computers, don't use 8.0, since that version won't allow you to boot straight into a full screen app, such as WATCHOUT (it always boots to its "metro" UI). This has been fixed in 8.1. Mike

Yes. Mike

Just a quick heads-up to let you know that WATCHOUT 5.5.1 is available for download. This version mainly contains bug fixes. Details in the release notes. Mike

What WATCHOUT version? I recall we fixed something a while back in this area, so I suspect you use something older than 5.5. Mike

Yes. Mike

Yes it does, so there's no penalty for doing what you suggest, neither in rendering time or in quality. Mike

What kind of file? Stills? Video? Could you provide an example file? Without more info I doubt you'll get much help here. Mike

Not entirely true. WATCHOUT no longer requires QuickTime. But if you have it on the machine, it can still use it to play content not supported natively by WATCHOUT. WATCHOUT natively plays QuickTime Animation and H.264 video in .MOV files without using QuickTime. Yes, this is somewhat confusing. The reason being that QT Animation is still the most widely used video file format when there's a need for alpha channel in the video, so we provide our own codec here. H.264 is also commonly used in MOV files, and MOV is essentially the standard container format for H.264, even when the file has other extension, such as M4V and MP4, so we provide a codec for this as well. But for other formats in MOV files (e.g., MJPEG, Sorensson, etc), QT will be used as a fallback if available. Note that use of these formats is deprecated in WATCHOUT, and is really only supported as legacy formats. Using them may have negative impact on performance, not just of the video itself, but also of other content played at the same time. Mike

Yes, playing a large video as a pre-split still has the advantage of possibly spreading it across larger number of threads. So depending on the threading capacity of your CPU, this may help in some cases. However, there's of course also a certian overhead associated with playing multiple videos compared to playing just one. Finally, you also have the issue of creating a single large video, at very high resolution (e.g., 4000 pixels across) compared to creating a number of smaller videos at more "standard" resolutions. It can be done, and WATCHOUT can play such high res videos, but many video encoding tols are constrained here. Mike

The frame blending feature introduced in recent version of WATCHOTU should make any irregularities caused by differences in framerate less noticable, since it smoothes out such differences. So I'd say go with the original framerate of your footage, and let WATCHOUT "upsample" it to its own rendering rate using frame blending, as long as you're happy with the results. Mike

I don't know. Seems the one on our website isn't the latest. Will have to take a look when I get back home (currently out traveling). Meanwhile, try the version attached (unpack the zip first, which should give you the AIR file you can install). Mike WORemote.air.zip

Normally, the value used is in the range 0…1. It appears you're controlling volume of something. Try fading the value to 0 and 1 instead, as Jim suggests, to see if this gets you the result you want: setInput "Volume" 1.0 20000 and setInput "Volume" 0 20000 should fade the Volume input to those extremes over 20 seconds. Mike

Yes, Jim is correct. The Air-based "WATCHOUT Remote" app has a "Reload" button for this very reason. But the work-around he suggests works fine too. Mike

You likely have multiple network interfaces in your computer, and the one you use is not the primary one. Make the interface that's being plugged in the primary one by putting it at the top of the list of network interfaces as described here: http://superuser.com/questions/117507/how-can-i-change-the-binding-order-of-network-adapters-in-windows-7 We're working on an improvement to handle this situation more gracefully in the next version of WATCHOUT. Mike

We're currently in the process of revising our remote app for iOS 7. As part of this, we have some hope that we'll be able to make it work for Android as well (at lest recent versions of Android using the Chrome browser). Will let you know, hopefully in a few days. Mike

Thanks. Then we're seeing the same thing. This has been fixed for the upcoming 5.5.1 version. Mike

You'll probably get more useful suggestions if you describe what kind of interactivity you have in mind. Mike

WATCHOUT will auto-select french language if run on a French Windows version. In this case, you can use the command line switch noted above to force english instead of french by substituting en for fr, just to see if this makes the problem go away. In either way, this will be fixed in the upcoming 5.5.1 version. Mike

That command isn't explicitly supported by the AS3 WatchMan API. However, you can use the undocumented sendRawCommand function on the WATCHMan object to send any raw command string, like this (assuming wo is your WATCHMan object): wo.sendRawCommand('setInput myInput 0.5'); Hope this helps. Mike

Each display computer keeps a log in its log folder inside the WATCHOUT applicaiton folder. So if the messages originated from display computers, you can see them there. Likewise, the production software keeps a simlar log file of its own messages. Hope this helps. Mike

I think you can do this already, albeit in a somewhat manual way. Try this: Make a 10% gray rectangle image (PNG), about the size of the none-overlap area, possibly with a very slightly feathered edge (one or a few pixels only), where the image fades to black. No alpha channel needed. Create an auxiliary timeline in the Task window that sits on top of all others. Add the above mentioned image to this Aux timeline, one for each non-overlap area. Scale and position the rectangle to eactly fit the darker area. Add a Color tween track, and use its Brightness setting to tone down the image so it's just bright enough to match the brightness in the overlap areas. Set the blending mode of each of those cues to "Lighten". I haven't tried this myself, but I think it should allow you to get pretty close. At least it could provide a way for further exploration of this idea. Let us know how this works out. Mike

I don't recall which exact flavor of VNC that used the "hook driver" (aka "mirror driver"). I also believe this was an optional component, intended to improve performance. The problem we saw with this driver installed were random crashes, if I recall correctly. Mike

The main issues we've seen is on display computers where the VNC "hook driver" have caused problems. Even without this driver, VNC puts a significant strain on the system, which may lead to degraded performance and stability issues. But as long as you do your own testing and are happy with the results, "whatever floats your boat", I guess. Mike