Hi All,
We are running a museum and using media players (MPs) to drive our video shows (around 20 installations). We used to use iOmega MP’s with internal storage, but currently replaced them with more capable WD versions. The output goes to HDTV’s and projectors. Used media is one or two short films in standart MPEG2 encoding.
The devices we use are: WD TV Live MP’s and WD My Passport (500 MB) drives
What is most important for us in a museum are the following:
- Auto starting the media (we had to start manually in iOmega’s)
- Auto looping the media (we had to set it manually in iOmega’s)
- Turkish subtitle support (if exists) (we had to embed the subtitles in iOmega’s)
These are the main reasons of our switch. Whenever we got the MP’s, we programmed the latest firmware (current as the time of this post) through USB.
But we start to get problems:
- When we attach My Passport devices to the USB port behind the MP, it does not auto start. We need to use the USB port on the top. Also when we use other (self powered) drives, the is no such issue. I think the up-time of the USB device on that port becomes an issue. This is not critical as we can use the other port.
- Serious problem is: Some of the My Passport devices get somehow corrupt. The MP plays an 10 minutes video clip 2-3 times, then it stops playing. When we shut down and power up again, the video will not auto-start, when we try browse to the local USB disk from the menu, a password is asked. We could only overcome this by attaching the drive to a PC, which found “errors” on the disk. After letting the PC correct the errors the drive works as expected, until next corrruption.
As some of the devices are on the ceiling 3.5 meters high, giving service to these devices is the most disturbing thing in the normal run of the museum. I’m in a very bad position as I let them buy these combinations and I have to correct the errors multiple times a day.
Any insight to these issues is very much appreciated.
