Greetings Cablecast SX Owners,

As many of you may have experienced, the first release of the Cablecast SX video servers hasn’t been as smooth of a ride as we had hoped.

The development staff at Tightrope have been hard at work on a new release of Cablecast with the goal of addressing these issues. After many months of work, we believe we’ve made incredible progress, and are now ready to distribute these fixes in the form of a open beta release of Cablecast 4.8.0.

Here are the issues that we expect to be resolved in this open beta release:

• Server stops playing audio on one of more channels, a reboot is required to alleviate this problem.
  We have made great progress on this issue. We have fixed two problems in our code that were causing this behavior. Unfortunately, there is still a remaining problem. See remaining issues below.
• Server seemingly randomly drops large amounts of frames, causes video and audio stuttering, problem disappears shortly thereafter.
  We have had no reports to date since the start of the beta.
• Back-to-back playback is not possible.
  Back-to-back playback performance has been greatly increased. The servers are now capable of zero-frame, back-to-back playback. Autopilot has some minor limitations that may cause some inconvenience, an upcoming release of Cablecast will resolve remaining Autopilot issues.

We still have some remaining issues that we’re working to resolve before a final release of Cablecast 4.8.0 is made. In this beta release, you may still experience the following issues:

• Rare audio loss on one or more channels, requiring a reboot.
  This issue has been exceedingly rare, we have had exactly three reports total in the beta thus far. (Contrast this with some Cablecast 4.7 installations that were seeing this problem up to five to ten times a day!) We are still working on resolving this issue completely, once and for all.
• “Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Error” messages.
  Currently there are two different conditions that are causing this behavior. One is a crash when starting to play back a file that was encoded on the system. We expect a fix for this issue shortly. The other issue occurs during an encode which causes the application to inexplicably use large amounts of system memory. We have added additional logging to aid in tracking down the exact cause of this issue.
• Video output is corrupted.
  This issue has been exceedingly rare, we have seen it twice in house, and once at a customer site. The behavior is that two of the outputs of the server interfere with each other and both produce a corrupted signal.
• System becomes unresponsive, restart of TRMS Software is required.
  We believe that this issue has been resolved, we just need more time in the field to verify this.

As part of the beta release, we are bundling a set of error reporting tools that you can use to help us diagnose and resolve any issues that arise. The more error reports that we receive, particularly ones relating to the remaining issues listed above, the greater the chance that we can fix the issues quickly.

That’s why we need you. We’ve reached the limit of what we can simulate in-house, and now we need your help to track down these remaining issues. They are rare, but we do expect the remaining issues to occur in this beta release.

Therefore, we are opening this beta release to anyone who has been experiencing issues with their Cablecast SX server running software version 4.7.

If you would like to be involved in the beta release, we’d ask that you first take a look at the upgrade instructions. The new software requires a driver update, which is a more complex process that the standard TRMS software updates that you might be used to.

If, after reading the instructions, you feel comfortable performing the update and are willing to send us error reports using the bundled tools, we ask that you submit a request for the software by filling out the Cablecast 4.8.0 Open Beta Request Form.

Once again, the process is as follows:

1. Confirm that you are experiencing any of the issues listed above.
2. Decide if you are willing to report any of the existing issues that may occur.
3. Read the upgrade installation instructions.
4. Fill out the beta request form.

Thanks to everyone for your incredible patience with us through this process. With your help, we’re confident we can resolve the remaining issues in the final 4.8.0 release.

-John Reilly, TRMS Developer