Today we’re announcing two maintenance releases to Cablecast 4.6.4 and Carousel 5.0.5.

We would like to thank all of our customers and especially our beta testers for all of their input. Without all of your help, we couldn’t make the awesome products we do.

Cablecast 4.6.4

After a very successful beta period, we are ready to release Cablecast 4.6.4 to the world. This release adds major improvements to VOD. There are several other issues resolved as well, and if you have been waiting to buy that 256 by 256 router, you will be happy to know that we can now control Knox‘s Chameleon 256!

Carousel 5.0.5

This release of Carousel brings a slew of stability improvements and other bug fixes. In particular, background audio playback, EDS bulletins, and the “simple” graphics manager are much more reliable. If you are using any of these features, we definitely recommend updating to Carousel 5.0.5.

(Continue reading the rest of this post for the full release notes.)

To request either of these updates, please email our support team at support@trms.com. In your email, please include the following items:

• Your name and organization
• Your current version of Cablecast
• If you haven’t yet sent us a customer registration form, please print out a copy and fax it back to us. Our fax number is 612-866-4110.

Release Notes – Cablecast v4.6.4

• New – 2804: Knox256CMAdded a new control module for Knox routers with more than 100 inputs or outputs.
• New – 2691: Subscribing to Podcasts via iTunes or RSSThe public site podcast page now has links for both iTunes and standard XML subscriptions.
• Bug – 2719: Autopilot creates incorrect CG events for closely scheduled showsWhen shows were scheduled too tightly, autopilot didn’t bother to check if the shows were CGExempt or not, and blindly created the CableDisplay events for Carousel.  Resolved by making autopilot check for CGExempt in all cases.
• Bug – 2771: VSX CM Play and Stop events do not fire at correct timesResolved several issues that would cause inaccuracies in the timing of events on the VSX.
• Bug – 2782: Vela Argus 200 CM starting lateResolved an issue that was casing encodes on Vela Argus 200 hardware to start late.
• Bug – 2799: Integra CM not Stopping DPC 7.7 changersImproved the “Force Stop” mode on the Integra DPC series Control Module.  This option allows for slower changers to still work correctly with auto-play discs.
• Bug – 2353: Cue-Times with multi-reel shows not workingResolved an issue with multi-reel preassigned shows being bumped incorrectly.
• Bug – 2589: Duplicating a show places reels in incorrect orderDuplicated reels were being saved in reverse order, which caused some confusion when loading up the show record.
• Bug – 2610: Small force menu doesn’t update the SX record/playback timeThe small force menu will now update periodically with new status information.
• Bug – 2632: Public site banner graphic isn’t uploaded correctlyTwo different file upload modules were conflicting with each other, resulting in corrupted uploads for the public site.  Fixed by forcing only one upload module to be in charge of the public site.
• Bug – 2644: VOD doesn’t tolerate minor errors in setup screensAdded significant improvements to VOD server ease of setup, and reliability.
• Bug – 2659: VDCP Control module can’t find some filesResolved an issue where forced events on the VDCP control module could fail to find the desired file.
• Bug – 2680: VOD Servers leak memory during transcodingVOD servers will no longer leak memory while transcoding.
• Bug – 2690: Podcast links don’t support non-standard portsGenerated podcast links were ignoring the port, so they would always be forced to port 80.  Port numbers are now included in the podcast link.

Release Notes – Carousel v5.0.5

• 2459: Poorly quoted strings cause error to be thrown when deleting mediaFixed code so that media is properly deleted.
• 2412: Disable transitions on VIA hardwareForce cross-fade transition on minimal VIA/S3 graphics hardware.
• 2413: Simple graphics manager crashes with “Object disposed exception”Certain playback hardware caused the error in the simple graphics manager.
• 2415: Installers throw an Adobe Flash errorInstallers have been updated to include the latest version of Flash.
• 2664: UI lets you delete a crawl zone that is still referenced by a channelYou can no longer delete a crawl zone that is “in use” by a channel. Previously, erratic display behavior would occur if the crawl zone was deleted.
• 2673: Flash bulletins can erroneously accept video filesThe web ui no longer lets you upload video files as a Flash bulletin. Files ending in “.swf” are the only format accepted by the Flash bulletin.
• 2758: SimpleGraphicsManager has poor lockingStrange deadlocking could sometimes occur in the simple graphics manager. Locking has been improved to prevent deadlocks.
• 2759: SimpleGraphicsManager does not obey monitor offsetSimply put, the simple graphics manager never did monitor offset correctly. This has been resolved, and you can offset the DisplayEngine in simple mode as expected.
• 2770: Templates made with missing fonts are rendered poorlyIf a template was created with a font that no longer exists on the server, the text would be rendered with a default font and get clipped, resulting in missing text. Now, the default font is still used, however the text is resized correctly to avoid clipping.
• 2467: EDS doesn’t update on a regular scheduleEDS bulletins now update their content every 15 minutes, in addition to every time an event “expires.”
• 2827: Background audio (still) doesn’t fade up/down after several minutes/hours/cyclesPoor multi-threading code would sometimes cause the DisplayEngine to “forget” what background audio it should or shouldn’t be playing.
• 2828: AudioHelper becomes erratic if DisplayEngine quits unexpectedlyWhen communication between the AudioHelper and the DisplayEngine was unexpectedly severed, the Helper would become unresponsive. The Helper now detects the communication loss, and exits cleanly.
• 2837: Overlay doesn’t resize when changing font sizesOverlay now “poofs” out and back in with the new font size.
• 2396: Caption data not saved in weather crawl bulletins.The web interface was “forgetting” to reload the caption for weather crawl bulletins.