Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: NEW, LOWER DTS DRIVE KIT PRICE

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 08-14-2000, 12:46 PM:

Got my updated DTS price sheets last Friday and noticed that the new price on the drive retrofit kits are substantially lower than they were. The 2 drive kit has a new LIST PRICE of 435.00, and the new LIST PRICE on the 3 drive kit is 608.00. These are still allot of money for something that was supposed to last a long time but at least DTS has made some headway here.
Mark

Posted by Rory Burke (Member # 512) on 08-14-2000, 02:43 PM:

For what it is worth....I think that those drive are quite reliable and durable. I think the fact that they are constantly spinning and looking for data coupled with the aggresive theater schedule really brings their total hours operating capacity down to reality. Perhaps my cdrom drives in my pc dont get the use but those DTS drives are always on and spinning. That ends up adding up to alot of hours in the end. Maybe there might be truth in to this I dont know...hard to imagine that those drive are just bad quality to begin with.

Rory

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 08-14-2000, 02:55 PM:

Rory:

Good observation. Having something work reliably 12+ hours a day, 365 days a year, is a challenge, especially for something as delicate as a disk drive. Unfortunately, the only "repair" is often buying a new one.

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 08-14-2000, 03:09 PM:

Hmm...here's a thought for DTS: why not include a smallish hard drive in each DTS unit? Three discs would take up no more than 2 gigs, so an 8-gig IDE drive ($150 or so) should hold enough soundtrack information for four separate films. If the DTS unit were smart enough to copy the data on the discs to the hard drive on the first show of a given film, subsequent shows could be played back from the hard drive instead of the discs, which would save wear on the CD drives (which aren't built very reliably, whereas hard drives last several years). Obviously, this would only be useful if the same movie were being shown repeatedly in a given auditorium, but the cost seems low enough that it might be a worthwhile addition, which would also help to solve the problem of users who neglect to change discs when playing two different features.

Posted by Rory Burke (Member # 512) on 08-14-2000, 03:14 PM:

I can see it now... The next future thread titles:

"DTS hard disk plays wrong movie track!! HELP!"
-lost one nowhere,USA

Wasnt there a thread where leaders' timecode were mimicking and forcing the DTS units to play?

RORY

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 08-14-2000, 03:15 PM:

Scott, what a fantastic and incredibly simple idea!

Hopefully DTS will take note of that. With a small drive, they could even set it up to be able to handle TWO features and a trailer disc loaded up at once into the hard drive. That way, the operator wouldn't have to remember to keep switching the discs when there is a double up in one auditorium.

I wonder if that couldn't be an add-on option that could hook into one of the slots on the back side with a single rack mount space holding the new hard drive. Surely that would be no more than buying a new drive kit and would perform better as well.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 08-14-2000, 03:28 PM:

To expand on the earlier post, here's what I'm thinking about the DTS idea:

requirements: the idea here is to save wear on the CD drives and improve reliability while making everything totally transparent to the user. Presumably DTS units could be built with, say, 8-gig IDE disks as standard equipment, each of which could have four 2-gig partitions (since DTS runs DOS and, presumably, FAT filesystems, the 2gig partition limit applies). Each disk partition could represent enough space for a single program (defined as trailer disc plus feature discs).

When you play a given film, the DTS reader sees the timecode and the DTS player compares the timecode with its own local mini-database to see if the timecode for that movie exists on its local hard disk. If it does exist, then the DTS unit plays the movie soundtrack directly from hard disk without looking at the CDs at all. If the movie's soundtrack is not on the internal hard disk, then the DTS unit plays the soundtrack off the CDs and copys the information from the CDs over the oldest (longest time since last use) disk image so that the next showing of that movie can be done from hard drive.

The beauty of this is that it doesn't require operator intervention, other than the usual disc-changing ritual that is done now and it can even compensate for someone who forgets to change the discs if the disc-less movie has played recently in the same auditorium. Since the DTS unit can play the soundtrack off the CDs in real time, there is no need for the operator to consciously transfer the information from CDs to hard disk. If the soundtrack is on the hard disk, the DTS unit plays it from that source; if it is not, it plays from the CDs. If the hard disk fails, it can fault to reading from CD.

All of this rests on the assumption that the timecode values are unique to each print, which may not be the case. Perhaps there should be a mechanism for the operator to over-ride the default to play from the hard drive in the unlikely event that he has two films with the same timecode track.

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 08-14-2000, 03:58 PM:

Would the hard drive be able to seek like the cd player? If the film were broke and fixed there would be a problem I would think. Is the HD seek time as fast as the CD? I guess you could rerecord the cd during the spliced film's first run. Does the HD have the same fidelity capabilities? Just wondering

------------------
Greg Mueller
Amateur Astronomer, Machinist, Filmnut

Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 08-14-2000, 04:52 PM:

Scott, your idea is so good, there must be a reason why they didn't do it already! It's probably a marketing reason, rather than a techinal limitation.

I would buy one, if they offered it.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 08-14-2000, 05:01 PM:

I'm sure they didn't do it because of the cost.

Going by what replacement parts cost: Since a hard drive costs something like $200, if they added one to the machine, it would add about $5000 to the price of the unit, so no wonder they didn't do it. It'd make the thing more expensive than Dolby and then what would be the point?

[please reset sarcasm detectors now]

Posted by Dave Cutler (Member # 515) on 08-14-2000, 05:08 PM:

Scotts idea sounds similar to what IMAX uses for their newest soundsytem. They load the soundtrack for the show onto a harddrive, tell the show program what file to play, and don't have to think about it again. Very nice. I thought it was very cool when I was actually sent a IMAX soundtrack with a trailer and it was shipped on a DVD-ROM. Too bad a couldn't use it.

The DTS-P8 (8 channel DTS) can use a harddrive, although I have never seen one. My DTS-P8 uses two CD-ROM drives, but I really wish that it had a nice big harddrive.

About the original topic. The price of a DTS upgrade kit would depend heavily on your supplier. Different suppliers can offer different prices, it depends on how much business they do with DTS.

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 08-14-2000, 05:29 PM:

Actually thats a darn good idea. It would seem easy to copy the disks over to a removable SCSI hard drive at a work station and then simply plug the SCSI drive into the player in place of one of the CD ROM drives and boot up the player in the normal way. I suppose that there is probably something in the ROM DOS that would keep it from being this easy.....Hey Scott what do you think?
Mark

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 08-14-2000, 05:41 PM:

Data rates and sound quality shouldn't be an issue. Remember that a DTS CD-ROM holds about 600 megs of information and runs for over an hour of film (witness the number of 90-minute movies that come with only one disc). Let's be conservative and assume a data rate of 10 megs/minute. That's nothing...you can do that over 10Mbps ("slow") ethernet. If standard CD-ROM drives can keep up at that rate, then a cheapo IDE hard disk should be able to deal with it easily and there should be no loss of sound quality.

I suppose that there could be a way to manually load the CD contents onto the hard disk, but that would take away from the simplicity and convenience of the "look for the sound on hard disk; if it's not there, play it from CD and then copy to the hard disk" approach.

Removable hard drives might work, but, for the same reason of simplicity, probably aren't such a great idea in a typical theatre environment. First, there's the problem of fragility: do you really want an 18-year-old popcorn-popper/"projectionist" who can't keep the port glass clean to be running around the booth with fragile electronic equipment? Also, there's the reliability issue: hard drives last longest when they are kept spinning. In general, repeatedly power-cycling a given drive will speed the wear on the bearings and cause premature failure. That would defeat the entire purpose of this concept, which is intended to improve the reliability of DTS.

One "issue" that did occur to me was the problem of having multiple soundtracks for a given movie. It probably is not uncommon for areas with large numbers of foreign-language speakers to run the same print with different soundtrack discs in different languages. I don't know of the best way to accommodate this in the system that I'm proposing. Maybe there should be some code on the CDs to indicate whether the sound on the CD matches the optical track on the film (different timecode could be used for different optical tracks); if the sound on the CD is different from the sound on the optical track, then perhaps the system should not attempt to copy the CD to the hard drive...

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 08-14-2000, 07:03 PM:

Scott, The only reason that I brought up the removable SCSi drive idea was that it might be something thats easily adaptable to present units.
Mark

Posted by Dustin Mitchell (Member # 372) on 08-14-2000, 08:30 PM:

Awesome idea!! No more trailers not in DTS. If the trailer was on the last disc, it will still be on the HD more than likely. Excellent!

Posted by Kevin Crawford (Member # 469) on 08-15-2000, 01:58 AM:

I think that this is a great idea, but they would have done it already. There must be a reason why they don't.

I think that there is probably a copyright infringement or something of that nature.

Just being curious, how would an operator know that the hard drive had failed? Many booths do not have people that check to see what sound format they are in, let alone to see if the DTS is scanning from CDs or not.

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 08-15-2000, 11:19 AM:

Have a central server feed the data via a ethernet to each player

Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 08-15-2000, 11:35 AM:

Yeah, and a Oracle database to be able to feed several different films at once!

We could also copy the picture into Oracle, and use a video projector... opps! What am I saying?!!!

Posted by Antonio Marcheselli (Member # 373) on 08-15-2000, 04:37 PM:

The HD is a good idea, but just a tought: what happened if, for example, the light go away while HD is writing?
In a DOS environment it is possible that the FAT blows and you have to partiton the HD again...
I mean that the DTS software should be able to repair that kind of problem automatically.

And... DTS P8?????? What?

Bye

------------------
Antonio Marcheselli
Projectionist of Cinema Vittoria
Florence, Italy

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 08-15-2000, 05:20 PM:

The DTS 8P is there awnser to the DTAC from sonics
It is available in many configurable forms either with cdrom or a hard drive and has capabilities of 8 channel output

Posted by Alan Lyman (Member # 557) on 08-16-2000, 07:21 AM:

I seem to remember that DTS told me,that with the new upgrade kit,the disc doesn´t run when the film doesn´t.Precisely to save the drives.

Alan Lyman
Denmark

Posted by Antonio Marcheselli (Member # 373) on 08-18-2000, 12:46 PM:

Gordon: where can I found info about the 8P? What is DTAC from Sonics?

8P is intendef for theaters use?

Bye!

Posted by Tom Kroening (Member # 201) on 08-18-2000, 02:44 PM:

Hmm, the hard drive isn't a bad idea, but there is a reason DTS hasn't done it. Hard Drives just are not made to be constantly read from all day long all year long. You would run into the same problem that you do with the CD-Rom drives, only with the hard drive you'd have to deal with bad sectors, driver updates, you would have to take the time to load up the new disks. There would have to be some sort of display on the unit showing what is loaded. There might be some industrial quality Hard drive that would be up to the task, but why not just get a better CD drive? And if $$ is no object, have the dts unit load the cds to a ram disk every morning at power up : P. A note about HD versus CD seek time, a hard drive is about 10 or more times faster at seeking then a cd is.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 08-18-2000, 03:03 PM:

Does anyone have reliability experience with the drives used in high data-rate servers like the ones being used with Digital Cinema? At ShoWest in March, one of the questions asked at a Digital Cinema seminar was how to repair the drive when it went down. The answer was that it was usually more cost effective to buy a new one.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 08-18-2000, 03:58 PM:

Perhaps some of our computer geeks out there could answer this one, but why can DTS not make an upgrade kit that will take ANY drive on the street? I can go out and purchase any cd rom drive and dump into a computer and it will work just fine. Why can this not be done with DTS? I'm assuming there is something in their programming or cards that is preventing this. The $15 drive solution has brought up new problems, namely with causing the unit to freeze up during mid-movie!

So am I missing something here?

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 08-18-2000, 05:16 PM:

Brad,

If they did that, they would not be able to sell a two-drive upgrade kit for $435!

"Ahhhhh...it's a PROFIT deal. Takes the PRESSURE off..."
----Steve Martin, "The Jerk"

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 08-18-2000, 05:54 PM:

I'll begin this with the disclaimer that I've never disassembled a DTS unit, so I'm not exactly sure what's inside it. I generally like DTS as a product, but I am not associated with the company in any way.

First, the issue with the CD drives needing to be specific models probably relates to the SCSI card. Theoretically, all SCSI CD drives should be more or less interchangeable. Some of them have special features (for example, if you want to boot a Sun box off CD, the drive needs to support 512k byte sectors), but for the most part they are interchangeable. The real issue is with the SCSI interface and the drivers for same. I suppose that when you buy the drives and card from DTS you are also buying some assurance that the things will actually work, whereas there is no such guarantee if you use generic drives.

Second, there really isn't a huge issue with reliability of hard drives in large disk arrays. I don't know much about the Qubit, but I'm reasonably familiar with Network Appliance file servers (aka "toasters"). The Netapp boxes use off-the-shelf drives. The older models used SCSI drives; the newer ones use fiber channel, but the end result is the same. In a 20-disk array, it's not uncommon to lose one drive per year or so, which isn't bad considering that the disks are constantly being read from and written to. Drives tend to last longer when they spin continuously rather than being powered down and up regularly. In any case, hard disk drives are far more reliable than the typical CD-ROM drives of the type that DTS is using.

Posted by Dave Cutler (Member # 515) on 08-19-2000, 03:36 PM:

Antonio, I don't think there is much information avaliable on the DTS-P8 as they are all (more or less) custom. I have a short 20 page users manual, but it does go very indepth. The DTS-P8 is used for special venue applications such as large format films. iWerks Entertainment installs DTS in their 870 and 1570 large format theatres. I work at an iWerks 1570 3-D location.

The DTAC from Sonics is the digital sound system that IMAX uses. It is a 6 channel system that sync 3 CD's (2 channels per disc) to film. I have never used it so I don't know anyting else about it. Although from what I have heard the new IMAX locations have thier audio stored on a harddrive in the form of 6 channel wav files. The computer is programed to play a certain file for each film and it sync's with a tach pulse. Gordon will correct me if I made any errors about this.

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 08-19-2000, 07:42 PM:

Dave is basically correct
Imax has two systems
DDP (digital Disk Player) that uses 3 red book cd's synced to the film
The DTAC uses a hard disk and via a spice software you add and subtract different trailors etc to a program file

Posted by Antonio Marcheselli (Member # 373) on 08-20-2000, 02:00 PM:

Gordon,

Thanks for the info. I just thought that DTS P8 was a 35mm sound system... :-)

The 8 channels are the same of the SDDS-8?

Bye
Antonio

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 08-22-2000, 08:39 AM:

Since the 8p is custom it channels are whatever you want it to be

Posted by Karen Hultgren (Member # 395) on 08-22-2000, 01:11 PM:

The latest version of EXE file spins the drives down when not used for 30 minutes. This works on the newer TEAC drives only (due to TEAC software requirements).

The drives we use and have used are the best available in the marketplace. We put them through vigorous testing and now RETEST before using.

Karen at DTS

Posted by Karen Hultgren (Member # 395) on 08-22-2000, 01:13 PM:

Hard drive on DTS player?

Well, we are looking into that and you will probably see a hard drive on a DTS player in the near future.

Karen at DTS

Posted by Rory Burke (Member # 512) on 08-23-2000, 12:59 PM:

What kind of computer is actually running the DTS. What are the system speciications of a typical DTS unit out in the field now?

Rory

Posted by Dave Cutler (Member # 515) on 08-23-2000, 02:07 PM:

The DTS-6D's I have used were 486 based computers. Really plenty of computing power for what they need to do.

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 08-23-2000, 04:36 PM:

Actually they are 25 mhz 486's with only 4 meg of ram. Adding a video card to one is a nice touch as well. Especially for a special venue version. Lots of useful on screeen data is displayed.
Mark

Posted by Dave Williams (Member # 299) on 08-23-2000, 10:40 PM:

I have a lot of experience with designing and building units with hotswap scsi hard drives, meaning that they can be pulled while the unit is on, and no damage to the hard drive unit itself.

Knowing the technical workings of the DTS system I do not see why it would not be possible to engineer one in at all. It would take about two weeks to work out the rough details, and I would need a spare unit to work on, and about a thousand dollars to build it, but it is technically feasible.

Anyone want to pay me for two weeks the build it?

Dave

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 08-24-2000, 07:57 AM:

Dave, Give me a call. I have one in the shop we can use. Am in Indiana installing now but will be back next week.
Mark

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 08-24-2000, 01:22 PM:

I really fail to see any advantage to useing a removable hard drive.
Ideally all that is needed is a internal hard drive and the software to format it and replace its data with that on the newest set of cd's placed in it

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 08-24-2000, 03:19 PM:

Actually the removable drive idea is nice. One can keep drives with all logo sound tracks, trailers, etc. ready and able to be moved around between auditoriums. A slick idea indeed. Also bad drives could be pulled and easily replaced!!
Mark

Posted by Bruce Hansen (Member # 281) on 08-28-2000, 04:45 PM:

On alot of servers there is a "second" set of hard drives that are copies of the "first" set. If one of the main drives dies, the back-up takes over without the user knowing. With drives costing as little as they do today, this would not add much to the cost of the unit.

Bruce Hansen

Posted by Steven Gorsky (Member # 603) on 09-06-2000, 02:54 AM:

Being mostly a computer hardware person, and recently a projectionist. There are probably a lot of things that could be done to DTS players. I would take a look at one, but we have no extras, and I am sure Steve Guttag would not appreciate it (he is our tech). Anyone in Maryland or if DTS would be willing provide one, I am sure I could make a few improvements, maybe including the hard drive.

Steven Gorsky

------------------
Projectionist

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 09-06-2000, 07:13 PM:

I have a problem with this concept of DTS reverse engineering in the field
The system works except for a problem with drive failures.
hopefully that problem is past. The machine is not easily adaptable to a lot of ideas that this forum is talking about.
It does have proprietary bios that looks for specific items
It also uses a ROM dos to load the OS
I really think the best solutions is to list your complaints with the system and let the engineers at DTS sort out solutions.
otherwise there will end up out in the field a bunch of hacked units that will be non servicable by anyone but the person who hacked them. This industry has been ill served in the past by many of these hacks

Posted by Steven Gorsky (Member # 603) on 09-06-2000, 11:10 PM:

Actually, the only thing different between a DTS player and a computer are the timecode board, the playback board, rom card, and of course the case. For example recent IBM cash registers are really pc's in cash register cases. I used to work for Target, and the registers at guest service ran MS Windows. If I put the timecode card, playback board, rom card in my pc with scsi cd-roms it would work just as if it were a DTS player.

Steven Gorsky

------------------
Projectionist

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 09-06-2000, 11:50 PM:

I wonder if anyone has tried converting a cash register into a DTS player? That would _really_ confuse the theatre techs...

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 09-07-2000, 08:10 AM:

I believe it won't work there is a custom bios involved

Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 09-07-2000, 10:38 AM:

Now, a combination cash register / DTS player would really interest the studios. If it could sell popcorn also, everybody would be happy.