John Reilly's dashboard

John Reilly replied on July 03, 2009 16:19 to the question "Error inside the CMS I/O Setup Page" in Tightrope Media Systems:

Hey Jon,

That error usually means that the computer with that IP address isn't running the CablecastDeviceControl service. So, hop onto the computer that has that address, and open the Services control panel. Look for CablecastDeviceControl, and start it if it isn't running.

(To get to the Services control panel, right click on "My Computer" then select "Manage." Expand the "Services and Applications" node, and select "Services." I'm listing that from memory, so I might not have the names exactly right, but it should be close.) :-)

-John

John Reilly replied on June 30, 2009 20:26 to the problem "Our weather feed slide is not working." in Tightrope Media Systems:

Weather crawls get spruced up too. You now have complete control over their format, and you can preview the crawl text directly in your browser:



There are a TON of new data fields available to use in both Weather Bulletins and Weather Crawls. Here's an abbreviated list:

#City#
Saint Paul

#Country#
USA

#Currently#
Cloudy

#CurrentIconUrl#
http://img.weather.weatherbug.com/for...

#DewPoint#
51

#ElevationFullString#
922ft

#GustWindFullString#
27mph NNW at 8:01 AM

#HumidityFullString#
66%

#PressureFullString#
29.71"

#RainMonth#
2.32

#RainYear#
5.58

#State#
MN

#TemperatureFullString#
63°F

#WindFullString#
3mph NNW

#ZipCode#
55104

#outlook#
Tuesday: Mostly cloudy. Scattered sprinkles. Highs 65 to 70. Northwest winds around 15 mph. Wednesday: Partly
cloudy in the morning then clearing. Highs around 75. North winds around 10 mph. Thursday: Mostly sunny. Highs around 80. North winds 5 mph.

The full list can be found by clicking the "Available Data Fields: show/hide" link from within the Carousel web user interface.

:-D

A comment on the question "How do I configure my Carousel Player to listen to the Carousel Server?" in Tightrope Media Systems:

The IP address field on the player configuration screen is used to inform the player that you're currently working on where it should pull its data from... So this field should be set to the address of the main Carousel server, not any of your players. All of the players in your system should be pointing to the same Carousel server, so the IP address needs to be set to the same value on all your players.

To change the settings for a particular player, you need to physically be at that player. So, if you need to change the settings for the player that's a mile away, you'll need to visit that player. You can't change the settings for one player using the screen on a different player.

That being said, several of our customers get around the remote access issue by using VNC to access the desktop of all of the players on their network from their own computer. VNC is pre-installed on all of the players, with a default password of "trms". You could attempt to connect to your remote player's IP address using a VNC client program, and change the settings that way. This technique, however, requires that your network be set up to handle it, so you may need to discuss it with your network administrator to make sure that it'll work.

I hope this clears it up a bit. :-)

-John – John Reilly, on June 26, 2009 20:20

John Reilly replied on June 26, 2009 19:51 to the question "remote channel selection" in Tightrope Media Systems:

Hi Patrizia,

To change the channel that a player is "tuned" to, you'll need to update the settings in the Display Engine configuration screen, which is accessed locally on the player as the software is launched. You will have to be on the actual player unit in order to quit and re-launch the Display Engine software.

-John

John Reilly replied on June 26, 2009 19:37 to the question "How do I configure my Carousel Player to listen to the Carousel Server?" in Tightrope Media Systems:

Hi Patrizia,

If you're looking to switch the channel that a 220 is playing, you can enter the configuration screen as Pete describes above, then click on the "Channel" drop down list. You should see a list of all of the channels that configured on your system inside that list. Now you can choose the channel you'd like to have displayed. Once you've selected the new channel, click the "Save" button on the screen, and the DisplayEngine will load the new channel.

Fore reference, in Pete's screenshot above, the currently selected channel is named "New Channel."

Does this help?

-John

John Reilly replied on June 24, 2009 19:43 to the question "Email Notification of waiting bulletins." in Tightrope Media Systems:

Hi megan,

Yep, you can. It's a setting found in "Zone Settings," under the "Network" tab.



The Carousel 5.2.5 manual goes a bit more in-depth on it, in section 8.1.1: Email Settings.

You can find the manuals on our documentation page.

I hope this helps!

John Reilly replied on June 23, 2009 19:35 to the question "DVD Import software?" in Tightrope Media Systems:

Hi Marcus,

Sorry about the trouble... I'm not sure why it's not included, I think it should be.

Anyway, our support staff can send you a link to download the software. Just send them an email at support@trms.com requesting the DVD Import software, and they'll send you a download key.

I hope this helps,
-John

John Reilly marked one of Eric Suesz's replies in Get Satisfaction as useful. Eric Suesz replied to the idea "Our customers would like to subscribe to Company Updates".

John Reilly replied on June 23, 2009 17:01 to the idea "Our customers would like to subscribe to Company Updates" in Get Satisfaction:

Just wanted to post a small followup on this... :-)

A co-worker came into my office today and mentioned that some customers were frustrated with us because they "never know when our new stuff is out," and "doesn't our awesome support site let people subscribe to announcements somehow?" Which reminded me of this topic.

We'll probably start looking at using our salesforce account to push out notifications to our customer base, but to be honest, your site is so much nicer to use, for both us and our users. Plus, it would allow them to control their own notification preferences better than what we could haphazardly wire up with salesforce.

Anyway, just wanted to add another "+1."

Thanks gang,

-John

A comment on the problem "Carousel engine isn't displaying AGAIN? :(" in Tightrope Media Systems:

Hmm, I guess I'm a little confused as to what your setup is... But whatever the case, the "Carousel" or "Carousel Framework" installers should be run on the main Carousel server, that is, the server that has the web site running on it. Your player computers only need the "Carousel Player" installer run on them. In other words, the "Carousel" or "Carousel Framework" installers get put on one computer, and the "Player" software can be put on multiple computers.

Running the Carousel sql scripts multiple times will not overwrite your media. --John – John Reilly, on June 23, 2009 16:48

John Reilly replied on June 23, 2009 16:44 to the question "iTunes like scheduling." in Tightrope Media Systems:

Hey bmackey,

Nothing like this currently exists for Cablecast... but I think it's a really neat idea. I particularly like the popularity-rating aspect. One could imagine a scenario where you open up "voting" to your viewers, so you can get a sense of how shows are "performing" so to speak, and weight your schedule with more shows that people like. Sounds cool.

We'll keep it in mind as we discuss future options for scheduling shows.

-John

John Reilly replied on June 23, 2009 16:33 to the question "how can i add a video that is currently on a dvd?" in Tightrope Media Systems:

Hey Jillian,

ETopping is right, you'll need to extract the video from the DVD using a program on your computer, then upload the resulting video file into Carousel as a video bulletin.

There are many utilities out there that can extract video from a DVD... One I happen to like is called Handbrake: http://handbrake.fr/

It's nice because it also compresses the video, so you don't have to upload a gigantic file.

I hope this helps!

-John

John Reilly replied on June 23, 2009 16:30 to the idea ""Alert Tags" idea in addition to Zones" in Tightrope Media Systems:

I think this is a really great idea. We'll discuss it amongst the dev team. I think we can get pretty close already using Full-Screen Alert zones, since channels need to subscribe to them already, and you can apply as many zone tags to FSA zones as you want. The thing we'd have to implement is the tag-based selection of zones from your mockups.

The one tricky spot I could envision is that not everyone would have permission to send a bulletin to all of the various zones, so there would need to be some complicated logic to determine what zones/zonetags are available to any given user, and only display those checkboxes.

Anyway, we'll kick it around. Thanks for the idea!

-John

John Reilly started following the idea ""Alert Tags" idea in addition to Zones" in Tightrope Media Systems.

A comment on the problem "Our weather feed slide is not working." in Tightrope Media Systems:

Sorry that this is taking a while, but we're doing a major renovation of how weather works in Carousel. It's not a quick fix, unfortunately. I've finished a majority of the implementation so far, now we need to run it through test to make sure it holds up in the field. Again, we'll be sure to update this thread as soon as we are confident in a release date. --John – John Reilly, on June 23, 2009 16:10

A comment on the problem "Carousel engine isn't displaying AGAIN? :(" in Tightrope Media Systems:

Hmm, what server address is listed on the player configuration screen? Is it localhost? Or is it the address of the main Carousel server? If the player is pointing to localhost (and the server software happens to also be installed on the player), you'd end up seeing 0 channels. So, double check that the address is pointing to your official Carousel server, where the 7 channels are set up. Does that help at all? --John – John Reilly, on June 23, 2009 16:08

A comment on the problem "Our weather feed slide is not working." in Tightrope Media Systems:

I've been actively working on replacing the data feeds for the past several days... It's my number 1 priority right now. There's still a fair amount of work left to go, but rest assured, we're on it. I'll post again when we have a better idea of when a solution will be available. Thanks everyone for your patience! --John – John Reilly, on June 10, 2009 18:10

John Reilly replied on June 08, 2009 22:49 to the question "CableCast RSS Reader" in Tightrope Media Systems:

Hey ben,

The show durations are in the "description" element of each item in the RSS feed. It looks like you're displaying both "title" and "description" on your page.

The actual show start date/time is listed in the "pubDate" element of each item:



If you can get your feed parser to display the "pubDate" element, then I think it should behave as you'd like.

Does this help at all?

-John

John Reilly replied on June 08, 2009 22:29 to the question "CableCast RSS Reader" in Tightrope Media Systems:

Hey ben,

I'm not familiar with any RSS parsing PHP scripts, unfortunately. But I am curious about about what might be failing with Cablecast's RSS feed output. As far as I know, it should be emitting valid RSS markup. Here's a link to the results from the w3c feed validator service.

Do you have an example of the odd tags, or how exactly it is breaking for you? If there's an issue with the feed, I'd like to fix it up so you can use whatever feed parsing library you'd like. :-)

-John

John Reilly replied on June 08, 2009 22:16 to the question "SOAP web service using IIS -- help!" in Tightrope Media Systems:

@Dan, hmm, I guess I'm still not sure what the problem is... Here's my understanding of what is going on:

You have a web developer who created a script that runs fine when hosted in apache. When you try to copy that script over to run in IIS, it no longer works in some way.

Is that about right?

If so, it sounds like the Cablecast web service is functioning properly (because it is returning data as expected on the staging server), there's just some misconfiguration on your production server that needs to be ironed out.

You mentioned earlier that it appears that your production server is sending GET requests to the web service, whereas her server is sending POST requests. That might be the culprit, as the web service requires you to send POST requests.

Unfortunately, since I don't know anything about how your production server is set up, there isn't a whole lot of advice I can offer. The only thing I can suggest is to make sure that whatever scripting language you're trying to run in IIS is properly installed and configured... Perhaps try running a small test script first, just to confirm that it's being processed correctly. Then add the additional functionality piece by piece until you find the area that's breaking.

-John