IPTV, questions and problems

[vachonb]

Hi all,

Got a couple things buggin me. Hopefully someone here has a better answer than what I can find. Got a customer who I just finished installing the 3417 demo IPTV server for, got everything working great but they want to know what every line in the config does, and there is a few I do not know nor can find a decent answer for.

1, In "Scheduled Programs" what excactly does "Surpess Viewer feedback" do ? The docs say it turns off viewer feedback (doh!!), but where do you turn viewer feedback on and where is it configured and how is it used?

2, In "Scheduled Programs" there is an area "Start page URL" this is self explanatory and the docs did confirm it, however it never brings up page, nor does it stay in the programs config when reviewing it, anyone know how to get this to work ?

3, They want to do a queued PowerPoint presentation, meaning they want to combine a video/aduio to trigger a presentation in another window. I cannot for the life on me find any step by step instruction on how to do this. Does anyone have a decent link or some typed on instructions ?

Thanks all,

Brian

[b.harrison]

Brian,

Seeing as I am your name sake I will attemp to answer your questions the best I can.

1.Viewer Feedback is done by a Jave console in the Content manager by choosing to enable the question Manager you are able to receive questions from the viewers Real Time "Suppress" simply denies them access to RT questions.

2."Start Page URL" you would need to use .asf format to insert a web page, Its not really a handy tool I have used it once but was generally unreliable an alternative is to use "On Demand" and use the start page there instead.

3. If you can get the embedded Power Point Presentations working I would love to hear from your perspective, I currently have a case open for that but the TAC eng had never supported that feature to date...odd seems even Cisco doesn't really use it internally.

[vachonb]

Hi Brian,

Nice name

OK, now I'm even more confused....(what else is new!)

1, The question manager is a Java app, it is setup in scheduled programs, agreed. However The surpess viewer feedback according to the docs has nothing to do with the question manager, atleast none that I can find. It is strictly for feedback. The question manager either stores the question or you can view it as the events occur, to be emailed back to the questionee at a later time. I've found no way to reply back to the person asking the question. So that brings me back to my original, where does this feedback section reside if according to the docs is a completly seperate area than question manager. If it does have to do with question manager, why wouldn't we simply unselect "use question manager" in the programs configuration since the question manager stores the questions anyways ?

2, Again, according to the docs, the start page url can be anything, www.cisco.com, c:\\vachonb\demo\iptv\iptv.html etc etc. Heres the quote from the docs on this one. "Specifies the HTML page the user goes to at the start of the presentation. It can be either a URL Internet address or the full path name of an HTML file on the local hard drive of the server, for example, http://www.cisco.com or C:\BoardMtg\slide001.htm. "

source: http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/webscale/iptv/iptv32/mgr_user/chap3.htm#xtocid272382

Hmm, so how do we get this to work ? I've tried 100's of times to get this to work and it never brings up a page, hell, won't even stay in the config if you view it.

3, I have been trying for over 6months to get a ppt to work. This is about my 10th IPTV install, numerous different TAC cases on this, no one can seem to get it to work. If it doesn't work or no one at Cisco seems to know how it works, they should take it out. We even had one of the original IPTV designers come out to us for a training sesion and he couldn't get it to work. I'll let you know if I find anything.

Thanks again,

Brian

[jsayer]

I believe that the Suppress Viewer Feedback that is mentioned is to tell the client workstations not to send RTCP packets back into the multicast group for that program. Normally, each multicast group for a scheduled program sends the video and audio signal out from the server and each client sends RTCP packets indicating how well they are receiving the signal, etc. While RTCP is designed to automatically throttle the frequency of messages based on the number of viewers, you may want to remove this feedback mechanism entirely (for example if you are receiving the multicast over a one-way method or where your bandwidth is not symmetrical).

As to the PPT, I've used this in the past with the SlideCast feature. It's been a while, but it definitely works. Can't trigger a PPT to start, though so may not be useful in your situation.

Hope this helps,

John

[vachonb]

Heya John,

Thanks! That makes perfect sense regarding viewer feedback. Here I am ASSuME'ing that it is refering to the person watching the video.

Do you have any references for the ppt playing using slidecast ? All the documentation I find regarding it is very vague to be polite.

Thanks again,

Brian

[jsayer]

Boy, slidecast goes back a ways, but I'll pass on what I remember. It seems to me it was pretty easy once you got past the documentation.

You cannot run the slidecast from the same server as the video capture. The reason for this is that slidecast is really a screen capture using the software encoder of the server. IPTV only allows one capture per server. Essentially, slidecast is going to capture whatever is displayed on an area of the screen on that server. You set up the slidecast program and tell it what server to use, and at the scheduled time anything in the identified area of the screen gets captured and sent out to the clients as a separate multicast stream. I don't recall now if you can adjust the area on the screen before the slidecast starts or not, but I believe that you can move the area around once the program has begun. At this point, you just need to open up Powerpoint and set up the window so that it displays as large as possible in the screen area.

This obviously is not as convenient as the web presenter feature that automatically advances slides, etc., but is a manual way to display a presentation in a separate window on the user's screen. I always thought this would be an interesting way to implement live application help (since it's just a screen capture) from a help-desk, but haven't seen anyone use it for this.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to an IPTV server to check if anything has changed in the past two years since I last set this up, but hopefully this is pretty close.

Hope this helps,

John

[khoi.tran]

Hello all,

3400 series IP/TV is a pretty neat product and fairly quick to setup but I have a few questions ...

* Instead of using the IP/TV client, can you use just plain ol Windows Media Player to play the files that are saved in the E:/IPTVMedia folder (default where they save it) ???

* Have you guys seen a high rate of failure (DOA) on the 3425 Broadcast server ? like doesn't boot up, the encoder card doesn't work , etc....

If so, let me know what kind of symptoms have you seen...

thanks,

Khoi

later