Prejudice. That is what it’s about. There is an old argument in the Pro AV industry about not using computers as video playback devices, or control systems, or anything else you can imagine that is mission critical.

I remember a few years ago on a certain project in Texas where the AV guys (I was the software consultant) absolutely refused to consider using an off the shelf Dell computer and a custom video playback app to run video to the screens. The options given to us were an Alcorn DVM-HD or a GVG Turbo. I mentioned to them that both of these systems were actually embedded PC’s with a custom PCI-E video output card (one ran XP pro embedded and the other some sort of Linux distro, or maybe even DOS- who knows). However, this didn’t seem to matter. it was all about how the non-computer felt and looked in the racks (and, they even threw the old argument- there isn’t enough rackspace). Come on, really? Maybe they didn’t trust my custom software solution, but Josh and I were building the master show control system running on multiple PC’s and servers, so I don’t see the logic.

Anyways, that project had a truckload of problems concerning video playback. My argument was that it’s the idiosyncrasies that end up dictating how these systems are run, and by holistically controlling one of the more important parts of the project (the video playback engine) we controlled the idiosyncrasies. After the system finally ended up stabilizing by buying twice as many devices (because the dual channel capability actually didn’t work too well in practice) the main issue was that the 74GB HDD size was way too small, but it was the biggest WD raptor drive available. oh well. (more…)

December 28th, 2009 | PSA | No comments