RBeddig

We've used WATCHOUT to play 3D content as side-by-side or top-bottom videos. Those videos hold both sub-frames in one frame and the display puts them into the right channel. Those files were H.264 encoded files it I remember right.

Which version of WATCHOUT and Windows? Are the user rights in Windows set correctly (UAC off)? Are production and display computers set to the same time and date?

Not for free but very good. Stand-alone software or plug-in for Adobe. https://jokyohapencoder.com/

I agree to jfk, but if you intend to upgrade to WATCHOUT 7, you'll need to run Windows 10 or newer.

It is set under preferences and usually 5 minutes.

No. Take a streaming encoder and place this between the graphic card and the display. This will give you a full with a few frames delay.

WATCHOUT will use the first NIC, Windows reports to WATCHOUT. Therefore the golden rule is to never use more than one NIC on the production computer. Once the show is loaded on the WATCHPAX units, WATCHOUT only uses a rather small network bandwidth. If there is no need for "live" control or permanent content changes, I would probably use the two WATCHPAX units as a head-less cluster and start the production computer only when content changes. Then I would use two IP addresses inside the control network instead of a separate network for WATCHOUT.

You say, that the WATCHPAX units don't show up in the network window but can you control them through WATCHMAKER. Load a show and play the timeline? Even if they don't show up in the list, they might still be controllable. Otherwise, check that your production computer doesn't have more than one open NIC and that the firewall is really off. We had cases, where we first had to turn the firewall on under Win 10, then started a connection between the production computer and the display computers (telling the firewall that it was ok to open the ports) and then we could turn it off again.

Hello Jef, Usually, all you need is a Windows notebook with WATCHOUT installed, which you can download for free from the website. Everything else will be provided for the training.

Well, I normally don't argue with jfk, but especially with HAP and AMD graphic cards we have seen those issues since 2018. The reason seems to be that AMD introduced some sort of energy saving mechanism in their drivers, throttling the performance down when the rest of the computer is almost idle. H264 and ProRes use the CPU for rendering and they consume quite a lot of CPU power while playing HAP files can get unnoticed by the CPU. Playing a HAP fullHD@60fps leads to some 2% CPU use on our systems. To test this theory, you could play your HAP file and add some ProRes or H264 file behind your HAP. This will make the CPU busy and should hinder the graphic card driver in throttling down. Since using the old AMD driver didn't help you, you might investigate AMD drivers a bit more. I think I remember that AMD at some point brought out a separate tool to influence the energy settings of the driver but my memory could as well be wrong here.

As far as I understood, you mentioned that it worked on another computer with an older version of WATCHOUT but not on the new computer with the new version of WATCHOUT!? Or did I miss a point here? If that is the case, I would start to test with the older version of WATCHOUT on the new computer first to see whether this still works.

Normally WATCHOUT should do the decoding, but if you see a QT error... it should be connected to QT in a way.

A quick research showed, among other similar pages, this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/711164 The error 2095 seems to be related to a launch of QT while the user rights are not sufficient. You do not need QT and should therefore delete it from the computer. The delete WATCHOUT and re-install it to repair any misleading decoder entries in the registry.

In your other post you talk about a new Mac to encode and program WATCHOUT!? Are you using Bootcamp or a virtual machine? AFAIK, Bootcamp is not supported on M1/M2 Macs anymore and virtual machines can introduce a lot of issues, depending on the driver implementation of the virtual environment. Or are you having the issues on a true Windows computer? In this case, which Windows version? I've used Windows 10 and 11 on PC notebooks but also on a 2019 Intel Macbook. No issues with HAP files. As you're already using Jokoy encoder software, have you checked what the Jokyo HAP player says about your different HAP files? It's a good and free toll to get some information on the encoding settings.

Sounds a bit like an user rights (UAC) issue or something similar.

In respect to the upcoming WATCHOUT update, I would rather switch to NVidea RTX A5000 or faster cards. WATCHOUT 7 will make way more use of a fast graphic card.

I doubt that the 2017Q4 driver supports the W6800 card. We used it on two occasions where frame-lock was not important and with a newer driver. I don't remember which one🤔 The main difference is that the W6800 doesn't support the S400 sync board and I'm not sure whether the 6 outputs on this model are frame-locked to each other. This was not the case on the WXxxxx cards. Genlock and cross-server sync doesn't work with the W6800.

A dongle which is not readable could be an issue but normally throws error messages. Check the log files on both display and production computer as well as the Windows event messages. I always try to avoid non-SMPTE resolutions. This can lead to all sorts of issues and maybe this was the problem here as well. Always use the next larger SMPTE resolution, here probably UHD and make the LED controller just pick the right pixels.

OK, most versions after 17Q4 will show bad HAP playback. Send me a private message and I send you a link to 17Q4.

I'm not a big fan of using 6 channel graphic cards and you have to keep an eye on the bottle necks in the system. W6800 works but has no framelock on the outputs and can not be locked to genlock or be synced to other servers. For softedge projection it is fine, for large LED walls it's bad. I've not looked at all of the components but noticed that the SSD e.g. is PCIe 3.0. Standard today is PCIe 4.0 and it's faster. For semi-professional use the components might work. For a real workhorse for large shows, I would only use workstation grade mainboards and components and rather a NVidea RTX A5000 or better than a W6800. Also I would never buy a blackmagic capture card. They are rather cheap but will also make sure that you'll have lot of fun and wasted time when you try to make them work. The drivers are awful and you won't get support from the manufacturer.

Difficult to say since we don't know your setup. How many outputs in which resolution are you using from one server? How are your servers configured? EDID set up correctly? What codec is used? What happens if you disable all but one screen and try to use this one? I have seen some black outputs when the operator used too much content on a server at some positions in the timeline. Too much means that the amount of data was more than the SSD could load at a time. Be aware that looping videos count twice! After reducing the amount of videos a bit all went fine.

Which graphic card driver? Which codec? SSD getting enough cool air?

My servers play appr. 20-24 instances of HAP fullHD@60fps on 4 outputs without stuttering. WX7100.

Hi Alex, Thanks for the efforts. Unfortunately I'm at the gate waiting for a flight and won't be able to test before the end of the month. An alternative would maybe be a broadcast address but I've not used this myself yet. The broadcast address would be 192.168.0.255 in a 192.168.0.xxx network. This would surely stay inside the local network which adds security. Kind regards, Rainer

Muito obrigado! Looks nice. Couldn't the app work with UDP broadcast as well? Then the team colleagues could install the app and just listen to the broadcast instead of having multiple cues to the different team members in the timeline.