Missing subtitles

[Jonathan Greer]

Hello all,

Every once in a while we'll have a film which plays but with subtitles (or captions) entirely or partially missing, which I'm starting to suspect is due to the timed text files failing to be unwrapped / extracted from the mxf files. If the film is manually loaded in Cinelister there is a "missing subtitles" warning, but since our new releases are scheduled (we have a TMS with Doremi Showvault servers) we've sometimes only discovered the subtitles are missing during a screening. It can be quickly rectified by reingesting the film which unwraps the subs, but I'm wondering - has anyone else encountered this? Any ideas why it could be happening?
I see the KDM needs to be open and the projector switched on for the text files to unwrap - if the projector is off the unwrap is scheduled for later - I've tried ingesting content in various combinations without being able to replicate the fault.
And I'm wondering if there's a workable method to ensure the subtitles will be present ahead of our screenings other than checking each film individually in each screen... perhaps once all films for the week are ingested, ingesting them again by copying between screens, which will unwrap any subs still in their wrappings?

[Carsten Kurz]

Doremis have a separate 'unwrap subs' option, I think in DiagnosticTool->Storage->Analyse.

I think the reason for this happening is that when you ingest these DCPs, your projectors may be powered down, and thus the IMB of the ShowVaults is not running. To unwrap encrypted (SMPTE-DCP) subtitles, however, the media block needs to be running, because it maintains the decryption keys and procedure.

You may do some tests to verify this behaviour on your systems.

[Caleb Williams]

Ditto on Carsten's comment.

Also, it could be due to the KDM not having been ingested before the DCP ingest. Does your TMS fetch KDM's and ingest them automatically?

[Jonathan Greer]

Thanks Carsten! I'd somehow not really registered that option despite using Disk Cleanup quite often which is right next to it.
That's a lot less convoluted than my suggestion (which also is no use if a film is ingested in only one screen)

The TMS doesn't ingest KDMs automatically - so far when I've tested ingesting the KDM first followed by the DCP, if the KDM is open and the projector switched on when I ingest the DCP, the subtitles unwrap at that point. If the KDM is open and the projector switched off then the unwraps are queued in the Ingest Manager, then they trigger when the projector is switched on.
However I don't know how & when the unwraps are triggered if both KDM and DCP are ingested prior to the KDM opening. We don't have any DCPs currently which fit this description to test - I'll keep an eye out.