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Question re: Playback Authorization Required

J

JerryL

Well-known member
Situaiton
Last night I went to play a scene from Star Wars Force Awakens and it was dimmed out in my movie list. When I tried to play the movie the system stated what's in the thread title. I went to the K Store help which told me:

Your download cannot be played because it requires authorization from Kaleidescape. Please ensure that your system is connected to the Internet and (optionally) restart your system. The authorization should be automatically transferred to your system within minutes.
Click to expand...

So I restarted my player but to no avail. Then I restarted my servers. That worked.

Question:
As this is a Disney movie, does the system look for authorization before playing every movie? Is this just a Disney thing or will it apply to all downloaded movies?

Is there another reason why the system needed to get authorization?

I'm wondering if downloaded content needs "live" authorization because we sometimes lose internet service and one of the advantages of local content is being able to view it when there is no connection. That would be a terrible shame if this were negated. I'm hoping there was another reason my system needed authorization.
 
A Playback authorization is required for all content downloaded from the Kaleidescape Store.

Once a title is playback authorized, that authorization is cached locally so even if your system is offline you should be able to play the content. Note, however, that if a title does *not* currently have playback authorization then an active internet connection is required in order to get playback authorization.

Playback authorization can be removed for a number of reasons. The two most common are:

1. Deactivating your system. This would result in all playback authorizations for store content being removed.
2. Removing one or more servers from your system. In some cases, this can cause a temporary loss of playback authorizations on some titles.
 
Hello again, Jerry.

I'd like to dig a little further into why your system lost playback authorization for "The Force Unleased". Normally, once a system has authorization, it shouldn't lose it except as I described above.

Would you PM me the serial number of your server so that I can dig into the logs to determine why you lost authorization?
 
Sure John. Thank you. I had watched the movie a few times before already so I did have the authorization... Im sending the PM in a few minutes.
 
After taking a look at the logs for Jerry's system, here -- at a very high level -- is what happened:

When a system has multiple servers grouped together, one of those servers is designated as being "in charge" and maintains synchronization between all of the others servers in the group. If a multi-server system reboots, sometimes the server that was in charge takes longer to restart than one of the other servers and that second server declares itself as now being in charge. Then, shortly thereafter, the original server reports in, also stating that it is in charge.

Two different servers reporting that they are in charge of the same system is known as a "split system" and split systems are bad for a number of reasons. One side effect of a split system is that playback authorizations are revoked on the affected servers.

Due to a small bug in the split system detection code, Jerry's system was identified as split even though it was just rebooting and, thus, some of his playback authorizations were revoked. We are working on a fix for this which should be rolled out in the near future.

The good news is that even with this issue in effect, systems that are erroneously detected as split should self-correct and regain all of their playback authorizations automatically without any user intervention. This correction can take up to half an hour or so.
 
Last edited:
Thank you again John. Great service and the system really did recover itself just fine. Theres good reason why we continue to believe in Kaleidescape!
 
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