Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Live-playing all the time...viable?

my profile | my password | search | faq & rules | forum home

»	Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE » Operations » Digital Cinema Forum » Live-playing all the time...viable? (Page 2)

This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3

Author

Topic: Live-playing all the time...viable?

Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-03-2017 11:05 PM

quote: Marcel Birgelen
What kind of server have you got? A GDC machine?

The problem could very well be in the RAID controller, but I've also seen issues, were a single faulty drive causes trouble, but those problems aren't correctly being noticed by the controller.

Like Adam already indicated, often, there's something in the logs or in the SMART data of those drives.

We have a GDC SX3000 media block and an external RAID box.

We've already sent the logs to GDC twice and that's where the "drives are healthy" word is coming from. The machine is under warranty so they're sending a new box and a new set of drives, but to be safe I already ordered another set of drives too -- I'd been meaning to do that anyway to have a spare set but just kept forgetting to do it.

From the comments here I think I'll just keep doing our usual procedure of ingesting the content to the RAID.

| IP: Logged

Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!

Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 06-04-2017 07:35 AM

Mike, are you using the PSD or the Enterprise plus storage?

| IP: Logged

Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-04-2017 11:22 AM

PSD....

| IP: Logged

Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!

Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 06-04-2017 02:26 PM

They seem to be more problematic than the Enterprise storage.

| IP: Logged

Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-04-2017 02:31 PM

Out of close to 50 units installed this is the first failure of one.

| IP: Logged

Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-04-2017 10:41 PM

quote: Frank Cox
Unless your server works differently than mine I don't think you could set up a playlist with your trailers and everything and then just let 'er rip. (On further thought, maybe you can; I've never looked at the "feature" list on the contents menu when I've had a distribution drive plugged into the server so I don't know if the movie actually shows up there or not.

Frank - you can indeed "mix" the playlist for stuff that's on your server vs stuff on the shipping drive, if necessary. All the content shows up in the content list no matter where it's located. If the content you want to play is on both the mounted shipping drive and the server, the content will play from the server.

| IP: Logged

Frank Cox
Film God

Posts: 2234
From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada
Registered: Apr 2011

posted 06-05-2017 12:40 AM

Well, whaddaya know. I never knew that before. It makes sense, though. I've never looked at the content list on the SMS screen when I have a distribution drive connected to the server.

Now I'm going to have to look at that the next time I'm ingesting something. [Smile]

| IP: Logged

John Roddy
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 114
From: Spring, TX, United States
Registered: Dec 2012

posted 06-05-2017 12:41 AM

The big problem here is that digital storage technology has evolved too fast for the digital cinema industry to keep up with it. I can remember looking at the 3x1TB RAID5 storage configuration and thinking it was the bomb-diggity, but not anymore. Mechanical hard drives are slowly losing their relevance as flash storage becomes so much cheaper, and even RAID itself has become obsolete. The FreeBSD community has been working valiantly for years to pull the ZFS code from Oracle's "ridiculously useful stuff that we don't care about and won't share with anyone because screw all of you" portfolio, and that work is paying off. When FreeNAS Corral released a few months ago, it really looked like my fantasized UBERNAS (one storage system to drive an entire site) was finally feasible. Of course, the Corral release didn't end up working out very well, but the potential is still there.

Yeah, the bombshell dropped there was to just not care about the internal storage of the server and offload all of that to a purpose-built NAS solution instead. High-capacity NVMe storage servers are totally a thing now. In my mind, there would be a single server dedicated to content management and playback for one group of players, but still able to instantly take over for another group if that one goes down for any reason. That way, all players get the closest-to-bulletproof-possible storage they need, and the boatload of unreliable hard drives get replaced with just a few NAND modules.

Given the industry's eagerness to move forward with bold new ideas like this, I'd expect to see the so-called UBERNAS platform hitting the market at any point within the next 15 years or so.

| IP: Logged

Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-05-2017 11:21 AM

quote: Frank Cox
I'm going to have to look at that the next time I'm ingesting something.

Note: The content on the shipping drive doesn't just show up on the content list -- you need to mount the drive for "live playing" to make it appear.

| IP: Logged

Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-05-2017 03:55 PM

Can one "Live PLay" On either of the Dolby servers? I'm curious about that since I never tried. I've had a couple occasions where that would have saved the weekend though.

Mark

| IP: Logged

Gordon McLeod
Film God

Posts: 9532
From: Toronto Ontario Canada
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-05-2017 03:59 PM

yes the dss 100 and 200 will

| IP: Logged

Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 06-05-2017 11:04 PM

But only from a CRU drive in the internal SATA-connected bay: a DSS200 at least will not live play from a drive connected by USB.

| IP: Logged

Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!

Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 06-06-2017 05:24 AM

The DSS line has always been able to play directly from the CRU drive. The DSS220 can play from a CRU if connected via ESATA.

| IP: Logged

Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 06-06-2017 03:12 PM

That's good to know. Thanks guys!

| IP: Logged

Carsten Kurz
Film God

Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 09-13-2017 07:46 AM

Barco's Alchemy/ICMP now has a direct play feature in the most recent software. I don't know yet wether it works equally well from Ethernet and USB3.0 sources, have to do some testing.

- Carsten

| IP: Logged

All times are Central (GMT -6:00)

This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3

Printer-friendly view of this topic

The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.