"do you prefer DTS or Dolby?"

The answer is easy....

THX

Steve

But I think Bobby was trying to attain some cost savings, which aren't in that picture anymore.

In the down-to-earth realm, I have a suspicion that adding network support would involve serious software changes on the DTS side, since they would have to be a lot more interrupt-driven than they are right now. I don't think they'd have to convert to a realtime OS, but maybe...

As for trailers in digital...over here, at the beginning of each academic term (the unit by which we set our schedules), I go through all of our DTS trailer discs and pull down the term's trailers and burn them onto a CDR. I will admit that a few times I have considered replacing the C drive of the DTS-6D with a SCSI drive, perhaps a SCSI drive connected to two different SCSI busses so I could just update the set of trailers remotely. I don't see why the DTS-6D would notice the difference between a CDROM and a hard drive...and even if it did, it could probably be whacked into behaving. Still, the annoyance of burning trailer CDs hasn't really become high enough. Anyhow, if anyone cares to look, feel free to play with my software; of course it only runs under Unix...

--jhawk

But...I'm a Mac person...is there some way to make a trailer disc on a Mac?

For instance, could I do it with Toast?

I realize that might be an incredibly stupid question, but please don't laugh...I'd really like to get into this, but I'm just clueless when it comes to any other operating system.

Do you (or does anybody) know if I could run Unix on my Mac?

------------------
And, hey! Let's be careful out there.

~Manny.

Certainly DTS would have to rewrite their software. And I mean all of it right down to the encoding scheme. DTS will certainly have to do it if they intend to improve their cinema system past the old APT-X100 encoding format to something that could handle 10.2 Surround or 24/96 audio. The standard DTS-6/6D/6AD model design would not integrate into a networked scheme involving an audio server. About the only thing that would remain at all is the time code readers. And there are better ways than RS-232 serial cables for feeding time code data. In rewriting software, DTS would have to configure a server for straightforward, simple operation.

Now you might say that simple operation is impossible for any UNIX driven computer system. My opinion is that computer systems get much more difficult to maintain when they are trying to serve more than one purpose. It is just like the poor Windows user that loads every piece of software he ever saw onto the machine and then wonders why it crashes all the time. If the computer is given only one simple job, it will hardly fail unless there is a hardware failure involved. For instance, I've been configuring computers to run outdoor electronic message centers. They're just running plain old Windoze98, but since the user is unable to load any other software onto the machine other than the OS and the sign controller software the machines don't crap out. Hardware failures are always a threat, but that situation is not really different with a theater setup of many DTS players all hooked into one power junction box. Nothing is 100% foolproof but I think the audio server idea would save a lot of money, at least for large multiplexes.

I haven't used Toast, but I'm pretty sure that, by itself, it is insufficient. The deal here is that all the trailers are stored in one monolithic file along with an index file, and you need to consult the index file to get the offsets within the monolithic file to pull out an individual trailer. And then to make a disc, you construct a new monolithic file and index file with only the trailers you want. So while I'm sure Toast can burn the new disc, it's not going to help you with the construction and maintenance of the monolithic file and the index file, which are DTS custom. The index file is plain ASCII though, and totally decypherable. The monolithic file isn't, but you don't need to decode it -- just honor the offsets from the index.

But don't despair, Manny -- do you have Mac OS X? It's unix on the inside, so you should just be able to download my software (just shell and awk scripts) and use it from a Terminal window. Why don't you give it a try? I suspect it might need a little bit of adjustment, but nothing serious. If you can't make it work, I'll go and sit down in front of a Mac and see what I can do. I suspect you can just replace the "cdrecord" step in my instructions with Toast (it'll burn iso9660 CDs, right?).

Bobby, about your Big DTS Box, really all I can say is "complex systems fail." Architect the system in the simplest way possible if you can get away with it. I don't know what you propose instead RS-232 for timecode data. Probably not RS-422, though it might be a better choice. 10mbps ethernet? Well, suddenly the world just got a lot more complicated and the timecode reader did too. DHCP for timecode readers? IP address conflicts? Eww. Yes, it's probably easier to extend to longer distances if you know how to build an ethernet network, which is more and more commonplace, but still probably not par for the course for today's theatre tech (but for tomorrow's, sure). And then you need to move the audio signals back from the BDB to your cinema processor (unless that's included in this box) and to your amplifiers. That could be problematic if its a long run. But I guess you can go optical...

I'm still not buying the money-saving factor though (I hear the coolness factor, it's true). I suppose they could do a lot in terms of saving board space and using fancier logic and FPGAs and so-on to get a lot better density on their codec, even if it stays in hardware, but it still needs to be able to supply the raw bit density per unit time that the standalone DTS unit does, and I suspect that the hardware cost savings for that centralization is just that high. But again, we don't really understand the internal economics of the DTS-6D (at least, I don't).
Also, if DTS redesigns their codecs, they're going to need to have a single-screen box anyway, since not everyone is going to be a huge multiplex. If so, they're still stuck maintaining two parallel kinds of systems (not to mention their support commitment of never desupporting CDROM users...).

I am using Mac OS X and I downloaded your software. The code opens as a text file. Maybe I'm doing this wrong, but I can't just copy it over to the Terminal window...well, I can copy it over, but nothing happens,

What am I supposed to do to run the program?

Do I need to know a whole lot about UNIX to make this work? Should I buy a book? Or can I make this work by just learning a few codes/keystroke sequences?

------------------
And, hey! Let's be careful out there.

~Manny.

Sorry I should probably have given you a few more details. You certainly don't need to be familiar with Unix, but it would certainly help to figure some stuff out. It's probably a good idea to get a book. I'm afraid I can't recommend one, I've been a Unix user for the past 10 years and didn't learn with a book... Anyhow, once you figure out how to do it, it should be straightforward.
I sat down with a G3 with MacOS X, and it was behaving extremely strangely with a DTS disc in the drive. Sometimes I could ls -l /Volumes/cd9660 and see the contents, and sometimes I couldn't. I suspect there's omething wrong with that G3.
In any case, I made some slight edits to my script so it is more likely to work correctly under MacOS X. Anyhow, how to use:
Download the script (dtsgrab) to a file.
In the Terminal window, cd to the directory you saved it in. If you saved it on the desktop, that would be "cd ~/Desktop."
Make it executable. "chmod a+x dtsgrab".
Stick a DTS disc in the drive. Type "mount" to make sure it is mounted, probably on /Volumes/cd9660. If it's elsewhere, you'll need to edit "dtsgrab" before running it.
Execute the script: "./dtsgrab"
It will prompt you, hopefully it will be sufficiently self-explanatory. If you still can't get anywhere, I'll hunt around and find a MacOS X machine that actually works and/or a MacOS X expert to tell me what stupid thing I'm doing wrong....

At least I got the program running...but I think there is a glitch somewhere. An error message involved the expression "*.cat" or something like that.

The list of trailers showed up, but I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do in terms of editing the list. For instance, my "delete" key gets an error message and Ctrl-X (aka "Cut") doesn't work either.

Also...there was no prompt following the list. Is that normal for this?

While it certainly would be neat to use this app, I have no idea what you'd have to do to make it work on a Mac. Just let me know if it's going to put you out of your way at all and I'll find something else to fixate on.

------------------
And, hey! Let's be careful out there.

Oh, POOP! The printer jammed.

 |  IP: Logged