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Control4 Chowmein driver question

Substance

Well-known member
⭐️⭐️PATRON⭐️⭐️
I have a Terra+Premiere-CoStar system. I can see all my downloaded movies but I can’t see the imported movies. Is something wrong with my driver settings or this is the way it is intended?
 
I have a Terra+Premiere-CoStar system. I can see all my downloaded movies but I can’t see the imported movies. Is something wrong with my driver settings or this is the way it is the way it is intended?
Is it maybe that you only see movies on the Terra an not the Premiere?
You need to have one driver for each server system
 
Is it maybe that you only see movies on the Terra an not the Premiere?
You need to have one driver for each server system
I think you are right. I will reach out to my dealer to install another driver. Thank you.
 
I'd reach out to ChowMain first. Co-Star is designed to work by making it appear as if all of the movies on the Premiere system are on the Strato/Terra system. It should not be necessary to connect to the Premiere server at all, unless you have additional Premiere zones that are not paired.
 
I'd reach out to ChowMain first. Co-Star is designed to work by making it appear as if all of the movies on the Premiere system are on the Strato/Terra system. It should not be necessary to connect to the Premiere server at all, unless you have additional Premiere zones that are not paired.
I do have an M700 in my equipment room. I don’t have it connected to any displays. I use it a vault and a way to add region B playback to the rest of the system. Is there a way to disable its player?
 
No, but if you don't use the player, then that's okay. You'd only need to connect to that system directly if you were using un-paired Premiere players for playback. Since you're not, you should be able to just connect to the Strato/Terra.
 
I'd reach out to ChowMain first. Co-Star is designed to work by making it appear as if all of the movies on the Premiere system are on the Strato/Terra system. It should not be necessary to connect to the Premiere server at all, unless you have additional Premiere zones that are not paired.
That sounds great. I mailed them again now and see if I misunderstood their last answer.
 
Sorry for the late replay.

The short answer is that it is the best way to have two library drivers to have all movies available at all times. Occasionally the Premiere movies could appear in the Encore library but for me that never happens.

I don't know if it's correct to write any details from Chowmain on the forum here.
 
Well, I don't know how the CM driver is implemented, but that makes no sense to me. The whole point of Co-Star is that your library is presented as a unified view as if it were all on the Terra/Strato system. Unless of course you have un-paired Premiere players.
 
I tried the same thing when the driver was first released. I don't believe Alan has or had a co-star system for testing, but this is the reply he sent:

"Hey Kevin,

This is the response i got from James Kleist.

If you are trying to get a list of movies from the Co-star zone that includes movies from both systems, the API doesn’t support that. You would need to query both systems in that case.

As such with that in mind you will need to have two seperate libraries."

With that said, it didn't work. The way his driver works is:

Server driver
Library driver
(Those are paired together, and it will correctly get all movie data from each. So encore server/encore movies. Premier server/premier movies)

The you have Player drivers. These have the output bindings and would be the control interfaces. These also have bindings to link the players to the library/server drivers. And yes, you can link multiple servers to one driver.

Doing this will show ALL movies, but selecting a movie from the list living on the premier system would not do anything on the co-star zone. Selecting an encore movie from the list would.

At the same time, if I broke apart the server connections and only had the co-star player connected to the encore library, and my premier only player connected to the premier library, it functioned fine but unusable.

Ie, I would have to select "Encore movies“, search, and either A: find the movie and hit play. (That would select the Strato and play it) or B: not find the movie, back out, select "Premier movies", search, find movie that was not on the Encore system and hit play. That would select the non costar premier player and then play it.

So I believe Alan thinks he's done everything he needs to do, but doesn't have a co-star test system to really see the results or even know how to articulate the problem. I'm pretty sure his driver is requesting the Encore player to play a movie in a standard API form regardless of which server it resides on, and there's a unique API command to play a movie from a server connected via a co-star.

I believe his library driver works properly if you have multiple Strato/Terra servers, or multiple Premier servers. It's missing something for multiple servers via co-star.

Kevin D.
 
Yeah, I'm not sure where that info from James about having to query both systems is coming from, but that's not my understanding of how the architecture works. Our Second Screen app uses the same API and it just connects to the Terra server. Once it sets up a control session for the paired Strato player, the Terra will send it a unified list of all of the movies, and telling the Strato to play a Co-Star movie will do the right thing.

I'll chat with James about it tomorrow.
 
The Second Screen app works perfectly for me. It shows all libraries combined as costar should.

It is disappointing that chowmain driver can’t do this. It is useless if I can’t see half of my movies.
 
Yeah, I'm not sure where that info from James about having to query both systems is coming from, but that's not my understanding of how the architecture works. Our Second Screen app uses the same API and it just connects to the Terra server. Once it sets up a control session for the paired Strato player, the Terra will send it a unified list of all of the movies, and telling the Strato to play a Co-Star movie will do the right thing.

I'll chat with James about it tomorrow.

Mike,

This ended up to be the same for myself with Josh whereby it would only be able to play movies on the Stratos. It felt odd to me with the fact that I can access my unified library via the second screen but was told it was a limitation. Seeing this note makes me wonder if they are nothing finding the same limitation.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
No, the situation with Josh is different. The problem there in a nutshell is that they need to know at all times the complete list of movies in the library that are playable, so that you don't say, "Watch Dune" and end up looking at a dialog that says "insert disc" or something. Unfortunately, because of a limitation in kOS, the Strato/Terra side of the Co-Star system does not have that sort of global view of which movies on the Premiere side are actually playable.

We are able to get playability information for an individual movie, but not for lists of movies or the entire library. This is the same reason that you don't see a movie on a Co-Star system get dimmed out in the movie list when you remove the Blu-ray from the vault, for example. But you will see the playback options dimmed in the Details sheet if you open it.

Our iPad app, which uses the same API that Josh and the Chow Main driver use, also gets playability information when you actually go to open the movie's details. Since you're interacting with a single movie at a time, this works well. But it's not really a good fit for what Josh needs, which is to know in advance about every movie in the library so that they know whether to try playing the movie from Kaleidescape or to move on to checking other configured video sources.

So, for the initial implementation, they have focused strictly on Strato/Terra systems and downloaded content. We'll see if there is enough demand to expand beyond that capability.
 
Chowmain has two drivers for Kscape. New Control4 Cover View Driver and Old List View driver. The old driver version 20191022 correctly shows combined Co-Star library. New Driver with updated Control4 Cover View only shows downloads on Strato/Terra servers. Not sure why the new driver is limited to only Strato/Terra servers.
 
I have both drivers also and I really liked the old driver because it would display the now playing cover art. The new driver cannot do this. That new driver cover art (same as covers on the k tv interface) on the touch screen, while cool, is not needed at all.
 
I have both drivers also and I really liked the old driver because it would display the now playing cover art. The new driver cannot do this. That new driver cover art (same as covers on the k tv interface) on the touch screen, while cool, is not needed at all.

Besides integrated cover art, what does the new Chowmain driver provide that the newest free Kaleidescape driver doesn’t have? I’m using the free driver now but my wife would really like integrated covers/selection but not sure that Aline is worth $300
 
It provides the ability to program c4 to play a movie or scene directly. I do this for josh calling out scenes.
 
“The driver does support co-star content. The best way to achieve it is to program the Control4 system so that there are multiple libraries and players. The player that can playback all the content should only be connected to the Terra server and where the lower end player only connects to the premiere system.

That way when the more advanced player creates a session with the server it will bring in the content that is available.”

This Alan Chow’s response to my email on the issue.
 
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