Today we’re announcing the availability of a maintenance update to Carousel 5.1. This version, Carousel 5.1.3, includes several fixes, many relating to the reliability of video playback.

Notable Fixes:

• Fixed an issue where Live Video Input could lose A/V sync over time.
• Upgraded our Live Video playback infrastructure to be more efficient
• You can now preview bulletins even if you don’t have ‘creation’ permissions.
• Fixed a bug where Alert bulletins (including CableDisplay bulletins) would take a long time to appear.

The full set of release notes are included at the end of this blog post.

To request this update, please email our support team at support@trms.com. (Note that you must currently be running Carousel 5.1, or have a current System Assurance contract to receive this update.) In your email, please include the following items:

• Your name and organization
• Your current version of Carousel
• If you haven’t yet filled out a customer registration form, please head over to http://www.trms.com/registration and fill one out.

If you have any questions, please let us know!

P.S. I forgot to make an official announcement about Carousel 5.1.2, so I’m doing both in one post. Carousel 5.1.3 contains all of the fixes found in 5.1.2, plus a bit more. See the full release notes for details.

Carousel 5.1.3 Release Notes

• Bug 3159: Possible crash when the DisplayEngine displays many zonesFixed issue where the DisplayEngine was not allocating enough memory for its internal zone list which could potentially corrupt memory and crash with a large number of zones.
• Bug 3163: 5.1.2′s DisplayEngine won’t launch on some systemsFixed issue where the DisplayEngine required runtime libraries that weren’t available on some systems.
• Bug 3119: Configuration window nesting problemAdded a missing target attribute to the “main menu” link in the error screen.

Carousel 5.1.2 Release Notes

• Bug 3070: Helpers sometimes get stuck behind the DEAll media playback will now force its window to be on top to eliminate the chance that the DisplayEngine window could cover up media playback.
• Bug 3047: EDS has invalid AdAstra database hardcodedThe AdAstra data adaptor in EDS was pre-programmed to use the database name ‘adastra’. This made installs not function properly who did not have their AdAstra database named ‘adastra’.
• New 3114: LiveVideo now uses VMR9 technology for video displayChanged the LiveVideo to use the newer and more efficient VMR9 technology instead of the legacy overlay mode for displaying video input.
• Bug 3117: LiveVideo interlaced signal looks bad on progressive displaysAdded de-interlacing code to the LiveVideo playback which will improve the visual quality of the video output on a progressive display.
• Bug 3106: Copying a group of bulletins to another zone doesn’t workFixed an issue which would not allow you to select zones or tags when copying a group to other zones.
• Bug 3118: LiveVideo A/V can get out of sync over timeAdded several enhancements to the LiveVideo playback which will improve A/V synchronization on most hardware.
• Bug 3087: Filtering not working in tag style zone selectorSelecting tags in the zone tag selector now works.
• Bug 3108: Bulletin previews don’t work if you only have management rightsFixed access rights problem where you would be logged out if you tried to preview a bulletin without any “creation” rights.
• Bug 3065: DisplayEngine quits and doesn’t restart if max memory is reachedAdded logging for all exit conditions from the DisplayEngine and removed the failsafe code that would exit to the desktop after it used a certain amount of memory.
• Bug 3098: Corrupt registry can crash editing of zonesFixed handling of bogus time zone data from the registry which was preventing Carousel from allowing you to edit zones and schedule bulletins in rare circumstances. It will now skip corrupt entries which will allow you to proceed and continue to use the rest of the time zone entries.
• Bug 3067: Bounds check on the zone tag selectorChanged the minimum number of zones before switching to the tag selector to be smaller. Before you could put in up to 50 zones which would be too many to fit into a menu, now it allows only 20 zones.
• Bug 2912: Remove the “Jennifer Approved” logo from the About screenWe removed the ‘easter egg’ graphic honoring our former testers’ job well done.
• Bug 3122: Background audio sometimes stops fading/resumingFixed an issue where entering full-screen alert mode could cause background audio to stop responding to fade up/fade down commands.
• Bug 3046: Flash error is back in carousel installersThe installers threw an error when the flash version was higher than the minimum version that we require. This was fixed by changing the way we install flash.
• Bug 3112: Service isn’t notifying Display Engines of updatesFixed an issue which was causing notifications of new alert (and CableDisplay) changes to not reach the DisplayEngine.