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Watchout 6 "Lost Connection"


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Hello everyone, we have been using a setup with a producer and two display computers, main and backup, for a TV show for some time. The machines work very well during the shows (we are talking about a show with hundreds of tasks and hundreds of gigabytes of media). The problem is that during the programming phase, after an update, very often, the communication of "connection loss" arrives and sometimes the machines disappear from the network status. After repeated updates or by reopening the project and going online again, connection and operation are recovered. I have read in several discussions on the forum that it is not, as I also believe, a network problem. I read that many people talk about a watchpoint/watchdog crash, but I don't understand whether anyone has found a concrete solution to this fairly widespread problem. Can someone help me?

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On 6/19/2024 at 9:45 AM, Simone said:

I had this problem a few time with different watchout media server but I never found how to fix that. Curios to now if there is a solution.

Same issue facing me as well please give me a solution, I can see lots of people asking the same question again and again and again.... no one is giving a solution.

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On 6/18/2024 at 12:26 PM, TatankaVd said:

…. I read that many people talk about a watchpoint/watchdog crash, but I don't understand whether anyone has found a concrete solution to this fairly widespread problem. Can someone help me
 

So what are the most common causes of a watchpoint crash?

The Main Concept mpeg decoder used by WATCHOUT is sensitive to encoding settings. Get the settings wrong and you will encounter random crashes. Doesn’t help that the default mpeg settings for most encoding tools are the wrong settings for the Main Concept decoder. WATCHOUT 7 asset manager movie conversion is directly aimed and resolving that weakness.

EDID irregularities are another sensitive area. Seems the gpu subsystem is sensitive to EDID and the gpu “adjusting” during operation often takes down watchpoint.

Windows system tuning is another big issue. Failure to eliminate background activities can cause watchpoint to crash. We simply do not see Windows related issues with WATCHPAX, yet inadequate Windows preparation still gets blamed on WATCHOUT. Again, WATCHOUT 7 changes a lot of the core underlying technologies to make WATCHOUT more tolerant / stable with consumer Windows.

 

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10 hours ago, joshy said:

Same issue facing me as well please give me a solution, I can see lots of people asking the same question again and again and again.... no one is giving a solution.

Is this happening when WATCHOUT 6 is set to LIVE mode vs. being in the legacy mode where you send an update command to trigger changes?

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Thank you all, in our case the problem seems solved. We had a feeling that the problem was caused by the video input lines. We created a master task for activating the input lines to be able to program while keeping them "closed", and everything seems to have been resolved. We're still testing this.

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Yes, when I am doing online Command (Ctrl+L) it seems online without any error message but nothing visible on the screen. And in the network my display PC is not showing as well. Very rare case show the network error message will appear. 

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In live mode, the display servers need to physically receive the media to show while receiving commands at the same time to visualize the new content on the display. Of course, this is a timing issue and therefore you will see a lot of strange errors and maybe a temporary loss of connection. If you just wairt a moment for the display server to receive the media, it should cure itself. This is at least my experience whith WATCHOUT 6.7.2.

I normally just ignore the error messages. You could also disable LIVE mode while pushing large new videos to the display server and then go back to LIVE mode afterwards.

WATCHOUT 7 has a different approach where the display computers can pull the media in the background from the new asset manager.

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