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Topic: Alternative content playback equipment with digital cinema

Justin Hamaker
Film God

Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004

posted 10-03-2018 09:35 PM

Over the past week I have two instances where I used a new (to me) method for playing alternative content our our screens. I thought it would be a good opportunity to open a discussion about what kinds of equipment would be good to have on hand to expand the possibilities of what we can do in our theatres.

Saturday night was the season finale for our drive-in season. We were playing a retro combo of Grease and Dirty Dancing. Following normal procedures for opening we discovered the security manager on our GDC server was not connecting. After multiple reboots, including different combinations of power cycling, we were closing in on start time and still had not heard back from GDC. This was unexpected as everything ran fine the previous night.

As we were scrambling for options, I decided to check if either title was available on any streaming platforms. When I found it on Amazon Prime I decided to get my Firestick from home to see if we could play the movies that way. Fortunately we have an hdmi switcher with audio outputs so we could run the video to the projector via hdmi (through the dvi port), and the audio to our sound processor via optical. This wound up working flawlessly and the picture quality was not visibly different from the DCP package.

With Dirty Dancing we had a sound issue because it didn't have digital sound encoding, or it wasn't compatible with our equipment. But once we set it to PCM it worked fine. I did have to tweak the screen files for the Dvi format, but that was minor.

The second example was this morning our managers had a webinar for sexual harassment training. Last night I tested putting the content on the movie screen using the same hdmi switcher, and a Chromecast. This also worked out just fine. Unfortunately I found out at the last minute that the webinar launches in a secondary window, so we wound up having to watch in the office. Had this been anticipated I figure I could have used the hdmi output on my laptop in the same way I used the Firestick and Chomecast.

All of this has gotten me thinking about different options that might be available for playing content. Previously the only thing I had done is use a DVD player with both hdmi and optical outputs.

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Carsten Kurz
Film God

Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 10-04-2018 04:30 AM

We keep an Apple TV and Chromecast on site for such applications. We use a FireTV stick occasionally, but only for private shows.

- Carsten

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 10-04-2018 06:04 AM

quote: Justin Hamaker
The second example was this morning our managers had a webinar for sexual harassment training.

<politically incorrect joke>
Your staff need training to do that?! I don't know what's wrong with these millennial snowflakes nowadays - back in the day, sexual harassment was something people were able to figure out how to do without needing to be trained...
</politically incorrect joke>

Reminds me of when a British newspaper infamously carried a job ad, placed by a city council, for a "domestic violence coordinator."

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