I'm having a strange problem with our DekoCast, something which has popped up on multiple projects at different times...

Basically, I'm building a sports ticker sort of thing--video input shrunk down on top of an animated background, with a Deko layer of scores and an animated bug next to it.  Everything works fine while I'm working in DekoCast.  The next couple of times I open the project in DekoCast, everything is fine.

However, at some point, when I open the project in DekoCast, the application refuses to play, cue or even load either of the clips (the animated bug and the animated background).  In addition, none of the actions in the project will run; I can click the 'Play Action' button until the cows come home, and nothing ever happens.  If I try to insert a new clip into the project, it won't load or play.  It's as if the entire project just stops working; the Deko layer and the video in are fine, but none of the clips will load.  My only workaround thus far has been to rebuild the project from scratch (fortunately, it's not a *huge* project, and I've been keeping track of my settings on paper as I've been going).  It's not an issue with the clips themselves, as they load and play perfectly fine in a new project.  And I don't think it's an issue with overtaxing the machine; as I said, I've been able to run this project in the past, both in DekoCast and DekoCast Central.

So...I'm wondering if anyone else has seen behavior like this--where clips won't play after a project has been opened and closed several times.  We're working on version 4.1.2 of DekoCast right now; I see there's a 4.2.1 available which offers "significant product hardening", but without a current support contract, I can't get to it--anyone know if 4.2.1 would fix that sort of problem? 

TIA!!!

Ben,

Without a support contract, it's going to be difficult for me to give you a lot of assistance. But my best guess is that you are running out of codecs.When you get the failure, if you are running DekoCastCentral, go to View->Resources and you will see a list of all open scenes and in the upper left, it will tell you how many codecs are free. If it's 0, then you can't run a new scene that plays a clip. Note, the resources list is NOT dynamic, so as scene activity progresses, you will need to refresh the resource view to get an updated list.

If you create Scene 1 that plays 2 clips with key and then loops them, then all 4 codecs will be occupied until you close that first scene. Until youy do so, any other scene that tries to play a clip will fail because there are no free codecs.

I can't tell for sure without looking at your logfiles.

Dave

Thanks for the quick reply, Dave!

I don't think it's a codec issue; I ran into that once before while designing these scenes (this scene is built to have two different graphic looks for two different stations, but not simultaneously), so I've been conscious about stopping and uncuing clips that aren't being actively used.  IIRC, uncuing a clip will prevent a codec from being reserved for that clip...right?

Within DekoCast Central, the .dkx file in question refuses to even load.  I can assign it to a preset button, but when I click the preset button to activate the scene, the button turns yellow and I get an hourglass cursor.  I can let it sit there for an hour and nothing will change (either in the GUI or on the program monitor).  Once I try to switch to another scene, the scene I switch to activates and runs just fine, but almost immediately I get an error message saying "Error loading scene" followed by the file path of the .dkx file.  (And, since the scene never loads correctly, I obviously can't get to the Resources window to check codec count.)

The other thing is that I can literally rebuild this scene exactly the same way, completely from scratch, and it will load fine in DCC (depending on which 'look' I have running, I have either one or two codecs free when I run that rebuilt scene).  It's exactly the same scene, just rebuilt from scratch in DekoCast; same clips, same Deko layer, same data feeding the Deko layer, just rebuilt in a new .dkx file.

The only thing I've been able to come up with thus far is that something in DekoCast is corrupting the .dkx file when it's being saved; I've been saving multiple versions of the projects I'm working on as a workaround, but I'm still a bit nervous about what exactly is causing the problem...

Ben,

If a clip is not being played, then the codec is available. It sounds like you're being careful with your codecs, but since you can't get to the View->Resources window, there is something else you can do.

Basically, after release 4.0, both DekoCast and DekoCastCentral are UI's that sent messages to the underlying Inflexion engine. If you start DekoCastCentral and try to play the scene and it gives you the hourglass, why don't you then run DekoCast and when it asks if you want to "connect to the running engine", click on Yes. When you do this, the upper left pane will show you all the current scenes that are open. If a scene is listed in italics, it means that it is open by another program (probably DekoCastCentral). You will see and have access to, the other open scenes. You won't be able to close them, but you can look at the scene tree and click on any clip icons and see if any clips are actually running.

Without actually looking at your scene(s) and the logs, I can't really give you a good idea of what might be wrong with your specific scene. But hopefully just looking at what is going on behind the scenes will give you some clues.

Dave

Hi Ben,

In addition to Dave's excellent suggestions, you might try the following:

1. The DKX file is simply a plain-text XML file. If you are saving versions of the scene file along the way, you should be able to pinpoint the problem by comparing the scene files from the latest working version to the non-working version. The files are not saved in a particularly readable format but maybe renaming it with an XML extension will allow editing and reformatting in many free XML text editors. I like WinMerge as a free text file comparison tool.

2. The Inflexion log files should provide lots of information about what can not be loaded and why. By default the log files are located in the same folder as the Inflexion.exe file.

Wade

Once again, thanks to you both for your tips!

I tried loading the "defective" scene in DekoCast Central, and when that went to the hourglass, I was actually able to open the Resources window and see that there were no codecs being used; all four were listed as available.  In addition, I opened the DekoCast application, connecting to the currently running Inflexion engine, but when I got into DekoCast, there were no projects listed there, just as if I'd quit the currently running engine (I didn't). 

I'll have to toy around with comparing the XML files at some point; I can't download any software myself through the firewall here at work, but it's on my list for IT.  And looking through the logs, I didn't see anything that jumped out at me; there were a couple of "Warning"s here and there, but they didn't appear to be anything related to being unable to play clips.

One odd thing I ran into the other night while troubleshooting this: I had the "defective" project open in DekoCast and was trying to force the problem to occur so I could match a time against the logs.  At one point, I had a clip that showed as playing--the frame counter in the File tab of its settings was running, and the Active Play list field showed the name of the clip--but the Cued Play list field said "Not Cued", and the field above that read "Not open".  So, apparently I was playing a file that wasn't open...!  (I didn't see this clip playing on the program monitor, either--it looked like the DekoCast app was the only thing that thought the clip was playing.)

We found an upgrade path to 4.2.1, though; I'm hoping that the problem I'm seeing is just a bug in the software and will be patched in the newer version.  It hasn't recurred in any further projects (knock on wood), so maybe it was just something flaky and transient.

Some more things to try:

Open up the log file in Notepad or similar. Search for the word "Fatal". If you find a message that starts with that, then the Inflexion engine hung at some point. Reboot the machine to recover. Hopefully you don't find that. Next, search for "Severe". If DCCentral can't open a scene, you should see at least one severe error at the time you did the open.

If you can't get the diff tool to the scenes, can you get the scenes to the diff tool? 

The fact that your clip playback frame counter was advancing very likely (IIRC, that clip counter is driven by interrupt coming from the codec) means the clip really was playing. What did you see in the program monitor? Was it frozen on the first frame? If so then you've likely found an Inflexion bug. If you saw no visible manifestation of the clip, then its likely to be other parameter settings of the clip or one of its parents in the object hierarchy. Look at opacity, crop, x, y, scale, compositing mode, or even the placement rectangle (I forget the parameter names) parameters.

Some things to note about the clip object in DekoCast. It has what might be considered a triple personality, namely: open clip, cued clip, and playing clip. All three can operate independently or at the same time. A clip and be playing, as indicated by parameters related to playing (like the advancing frame count), while at the same time another codec (or codecs if playing with key) can be in use to cue up a second clip (as indicated by a parameter named something like "is cued"), while at the same time yet another clip can be opened and properties of that clip can be seen by looking at the appropriate parameters (I forget which ones, one indicates how many frames are in the clip, perhaps clip format and such). So it is reasonable to be playing a clip while not having another one cued or another one opened. Note also that these three personalities of the clip object (let's call them the holy trinity of clip-ness) form a pipeline: first a clip must be opened, then cued, then played, and as it turns out, you can do all three overlapping. While this might seem strange, it turns out to be a convenient way to have one clip playing and be able to do a frame-accurate cut to another clip using a single clip object. Or, with a single clip object, you can cue a clip, open another clip and "cue append" it to the first, and then open and "cue append" yet another clip. All can play back to back with a single codec, assuming they are the same format.