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BrightWall video loop length?

JRB Technical

January 12, 2018 21:48

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Is there a minimum length for BrightWall loop video's that may cause issues?

I had a quick job for an exhibit, with 12 players in 3 sets.

One of the sets had a 30 second loop on 3 players. Every once in a while for this set, the 3rd player would get out of sync by about 2 seconds.  All the videos were the same length.

I have never had any issues with BrightWall videos getting out of sync, but I have never done this with loops so short. So I was wondering if these were maybe too short, and this might have been causing an issue with the sync.

Just trying to figure out what may have been the issue.

Thanks!

 

 

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3 comments

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  Lyndon January 19, 2018 23:08

   

  I haven't heard of any min length for sync. It could be a content issue. it could be a communication issue. What was out of sync, the master with the slaves, or the slaves with each other?

   

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  JRB Technical January 20, 2018 19:38

  Just the Screen 3  player was behind by about 2 seconds.  This happened twice during 5 day run.

  First time, unit was running fine, but the HDMI cable in the wall was bad, and they had a cable outside the wall to display running. When they pulled a new HDMI cable and reconnected it is around the time when it became out of sync the first time.  No AV techs were around when they did this, so I don't know if they just plugged in new HDMI, unplugged power, etc.  

  Second time, same unit a few days later. No on seemed to think anything was unplugged, unpowered, etc.  Players were on top of Expo wall, so not easy to get to, accidentally bump, etc.

  HD1020 players, 1920x1080 30fps video CBR 20 Mbps, all the exact same time length.

  Netgear GS105 switch, only the 3 players on the switch.

  The units were still labeled when I got them back, I have had the same set running here as a test, stays in sync. Unplugging the power on player 3, and plugging back in, the player catches up fine after booting.

  BrightWall has been robust, I haven't really seen any issues like this, except a while back when I accidentally used a Smart Switch here at home for testing, and after a while realized that the Smart Switch is why I was having the issue at home as it was slowing down traffic between the BrightSign players. I normally always use the basic NetGear switches, I have a bunch that are part of my rental package kits. Any time an individual player in a set is power cycled for any reason, it always catches up with the others shortly. This weird delay on only the 3rd player is just baffling.

  It's just kind of frustrating when something is normally reliable, and you can't find a reason for why it isn't when it does something like this. I was hoping maybe it was because of the short file length, which would be an easy fix if I knew that video files needed to be at least xx seconds long.

  Anyway, shows over, client is happy. 

   

• 0
  
  Lyndon January 21, 2018 05:13

   

  I'm going to be down at the corporate office this week for meetings. I'll as the dev team about possible issues with short files. I haven't heard of any reported, but most customers aren't using files this short, so it's possible.

  You can log into the master and the slaves, and turn on network capture for 30 seconds. In the pcap files you'll see multicast traffic from master to slaves, and then all slaves respond back to the master. Should something like this happen again you can see if the master is seeing a response from all the slaves. You can also check if that particular slave is getting a reply from the master. Although, usually if there's a communication issue it would happen more than twice over that period of time.