Out-of-warranty repairs for IMS2000 and ShowVault/IMB discontinued

[Leo Enticknap]

Depending on where you are, consumer law issues may exist...

The devices in question are business assets, not consumer products. As a general rule and in many countries, the law places a higher duty of care on manufacturers and vendors of consumer products than of goods and services sold to businesses for the purpose of carrying out commercial activity. The obvious American example is the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which defines the products it covers as "tangible personal property for sale and that is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes." Obviously, DCP servers and media blocks do not fit that description. I would hazard a guess that by undertaking to continue support for holders of active warranties, the legal bases have been covered in this case. Also, the email notice does not state which territories it applies to. It could be that the immediate discontinuation of out-of-warranty repair service only applies to the USA.

[James Gardiner]

There is also the duty of care element. A cinema player is "expected" to have minimum 10 years service period. Consumers have purchased the units with the expectation of being able to utilise it for 10 years. You cannot sell it under that narrative then 3 years after say you're not supporting it at all, even for basic maintenance work. Its the same for car makers etc.

[Marcel Birgelen]

There is also the duty of care element. A cinema player is "expected" to have minimum 10 years service period. Consumers have purchased the units with the expectation of being able to utilise it for 10 years. You cannot sell it under that narrative then 3 years after say you're not supporting it at all, even for basic maintenance work. Its the same for car makers etc.

I personally totally agree with this kind of reasoning, but the reality may be different from where you live. Maybe Australia had the balls to implement this for businesses too. But even if laws are on your side, being in the right and getting what you're due are two different things, often divided by very long and costly legal battles.

Over here in the EU, what you stated applies to all transactions between businesses and consumers, but not between businesses. As a consumer, you also have an automatic two year warranty, but as a business, you're expected to read the fine print.

The two year minimum warranty from the manufacturer for consumers is something Apple has been repeatedly successfully sued over in different EU countries, as they tried to offset this to their distributors and sales channel partners, who are already operating on razor-thin margins, while competing against Apple itself, both on-line and in brick-and-mortar retail.

But as a business, if the warranty on offer is one year, it's one year, if it's zero, then it's zilch. Again, you're supposed to read the fine print... There is no extended consumer warranty, so even if a hundred-thousand Euro ticket item that's expected to last 10 years fails after three years and you haven't taken care in the form of some extended warranty, you're holding the bag.

There are quite a few movements to counter this, both driven by interest groups formed by many mainly smaller businesses, but also from the governments perspective, but more to reduce the amount of e-waste, where good stuff gets thrown out, simply because it's not covered by some kind of support contract anymore. Unfortunately, the lobby against such movements is equally strong and compromises usually lean positive for big business and seldomly in favor of the smaller players.

While the wise choice may to be to choose with your wallet, depending on your niche and how monopolized it is, there often are only equally bad choices to make.

[Bruce Cloutier]

It is frustrating as there is not much anyone can do. The legal path is leverage perhaps a government can use but the consumer faces a lot of time and money trying that approach. Just replacing the device pissing you off is quicker and has less financial impact in the long run. Then just carry a grudge.

If Dolby strands enough customers a purchasing bias will evolve. This will shift business to the competition and even open the doors for new companies to enter the market. Even in the face of negative reviews outlining these events there probably won't be a notable impact on their sales.

But is there a viable alternative where such things are likely to never occur? Or is there a tangible risk in general? Is that risk on the increase? Is the tech heading in the right direction?

Then there is the GDC/Paramount thing.

It might not be so much 'right to repair' as it is now whether or not even the original manufacturer can 'repair at all'? We are not just looking a physical parts. There is firmware written by evolving teams of programmers all of whom eventually part ways and dissolve into the wind. None of these companies can even list all of the authors and designers having a role in a product. No exhaustive credit roll. There are 3rd party operating systems and software (and hardware) libraries of really unknown history and origin in all of this.

Remember K.I.S.S.? I keep saying that my next car will be a classic no later than mid-1970s. Those are the last that the average person could repair and even enhance. You know, clean and gap the plugs, swap in a new set of points and maybe tweak the timing and away you go. Um... replace the fuel filter? You could pull the carb and clean the ports. And if you were in the mood you could hone the cylinders and drop in an oversized set of rings. Grind new valve seats. Um... is there an analogy to any of that with the systems that you are running in these theaters?

I bet there were a lot of ingenious repairs on film projectors making sure that the show goes on. Most old bowling alleys had a mill and lathe. They employed a handy type individual that could make a part on the spot to keep those (entirely mechanical) pin setters running. Now an imperceptible glitch in voltage during a battery change flips a few bits and you create landfill content not to mention a dark screen.

Is there a solution? Something tangible for us to work on?

I think maybe we've headed down a rabbit hole from which there is no escape.

Spun up a 47 year-old turntable the other day. Was playing 60 year-old vinyl in minutes. No configuration procedure. No settings to adjust to get it to work. It just did! Can't explain what it is about flipping through boxes of albums.

Okay, so the replacement surround sound amp happened to have MM phono input where the prior did not. And, I had to replace that receiver because 8 years ago the HDMI standard changed blocking my ability to pass 4K through it. I have one of the first LG 86" 4K panels on the wall. It took me 8 years to get past the fact that HDMI was a moving target, Ugh.

[Leo Enticknap]

If Dolby strands enough customers a purchasing bias will evolve. This will shift business to the competition and even open the doors for new companies to enter the market. Even in the face of negative reviews outlining these events there probably won't be a notable impact on their sales.

In the USA, the market for DCP servers and media blocks is essentially an oligopoly consisting of Dolby, Barco, and GDC (a duopoly if you don't have a Barco projector), with a tiny smattering of Christie IMBs, Sonys, and Qubes here and there. Dolby's competitors are also aggressively ending support for models that were last sold quite recently. I recently lost a certificate during a battery swapout on an ICMP+ in a DP4K-30L. It was in warranty, and I asked Cinionic if they could ship us another + rather than an -X, so we wouldn't have to reintialize the RAID and reingest about 3TB of stuff. No luck: they only now carry -Xs in stock. So all Dolby is doing here is changing their after sales support offering such that it is roughly in line with that of their competitors.

As for turntables, many sold nowadays include preamps (most of them not very good and fixed to the RIAA curve, so not much use if you like to play pre-1960s vinyl and/or 78s), and in some cases even USB analog to digital converters, so there is some more planned obsolescence for you! However, I was recently able to obtain a new idler wheel for the one in my 1970s Goldring Lenco, that had worn to the point at which it couldn't handle the weight of a 12" shellac record and maintain a consistent 78.26 RPM per the strobocope (had to order it on Ebay from a guy in Denmark, but doing so was entirely hassle free): as with 16mm classroom projectors of that vintage, replacements for most life-limited parts are still easily available.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

This situation most likely has Ray Dolby spinning in his grave. Dolby USED to be one of the very best at full support of ALL of its products, even the legacy stuff. (CP100 anyone?) If the schematics weren't actually IN the manuals, they'd send them to you on request. I had a few instances where a card was "officially" discontinued, but with a simple phone call to LA or San Fran, someone there would actually manage to find what I needed and send it to me, at very reasonable (and sometimes NO) cost.

The latest example I had was with the Dolby Digital "wow" problem on startup in a changeover booth http://www.film-tech.com/cgi-bin/ubb...=011063#000000
and Norm at Dolby really went the extra mile to help out. (BTW for those curious of the outcome, see the last post in that thread.)

The digital trainwreck has proven many of the naysayers (including me) right about how it will ultimately cost the exhibitors a fortune while the studios reap ALL of the benefits. Now it seems that Dolby has adopted the studios attitude of " the exhibitors" by forcing upgrades when support may still be viable. (Even though it may be inconvenient to Dolby to do so, they USED to care enough to do it anyways.)

Bruce mentioned software and firmware having been written by teams that may no longer exist. My experience with AMX AXcess software is that as long as you have at least parts of the original code, you CAN with some effort re-write and evolve an existing software file to do whatever you need it to do. I see NO reason why ANY competent software/firmware code writer cannot update even an outdated system with some perseverance. Yes, it will take time, and yes it will cost money...but the RESPONSIBLE thing for manufacturers to do would be to stop producing 4 and five figure throwaway hardware and keep the legacy stuff operating as long as possible.

But as well all know, doing the right thing and being responsible is NOT the corporate way. (With rare exceptions like Bruce's company.)

And to end this with a bit of comedy, a former coworker shared a meme he found with me. The caption read "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned or a homosexual slightly inconvenienced" . You don't want to ever inconvenience me, lol.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Meanwhile, the likes of Apple have implemented secure storage solutions in "permanent RAM" that even all the three-letter services in the U.S. seem to have a hard time getting access to. I guess such a solution should also keep the evil pirates away and allow for a somewhat less rickety design...

I hear that there is a server with a Raspberry Pi in it. Maybe there will be one with an iPhone as the security block. Let the iPhone do the streaming decryption, forensic marking, etc. Of course, there will be a new model next year, and you will have to update.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I hear that there is a server with a Raspberry Pi in it. Maybe there will be one with an iPhone as the security block. Let the iPhone do the streaming decryption, forensic marking, etc. Of course, there will be a new model next year, and you will have to update.

Yes, the GDC SR-1000 has a Raspberry PI in it.

[Leo Enticknap]

Maybe there will be one with an iPhone as the security block. Let the iPhone do the streaming decryption, forensic marking, etc. Of course, there will be a new model next year, and you will have to update.

And the certificate battery will be encased in several square inches of epoxy glue, that require you to soften it with a hairdryer for five minutes and then scrape it away with a special plastic tool that costs $600 (only available from Apple, of course) before attempting the swapout.

[Steve Guttag]

Or Apple's latest tactics...serialize all parts so you can't swap parts with donor boards/screens. Without the means to serialize the replacement part, you lose the means to fix it without some key software to serialize it. For those that don't, Louis Rossmann (search on YouTube) has been showing people how to repair MacBooks for a decade or more and it a crusader in the "right to repair," which I think is really a Right to Own.

But, back on topic...one would need to know WHY they are cutting their support short. Are there key parts no longer available or do they now only have enough parts to ensure that they honor their extended warranties and need to "hoard" them to ensure those obligations? C19, combined with certain chip manufacturer's plant burning to the ground, has had the effect of early obsolescence of a LOT of things and not just cinema. I've been waiting over a year for some things in the A/V industry and we are not talking esoteric.

I would think an issue with mediablocks is what the requirements are to work on them (how secure the room is...the person(s) that do the work...etc. I don't know what the FIPS requirements are to do the work. Perhaps there are simply not enough parts to go around and one would need to redesign things for currently available parts and the cost it would impose. A problem with cinema is how small we are. It was one thing when things were analog audio and most things could be done cheaply and even by the hobbyist. Heck, I was even designing my own PCBs and assembling for integrating cinema processors. However, much of the current stuff represents a lot of $$$ in hardware and software when changes happen. How many parts would one have to sell to recoup that sort of investment?

Now, putting a certificate back in...I don't know what is involved but I would have a hard time believing that is much more than whatever apparatus generates the certificate, the people rated to do the work and whatever facility is required to do the work within. It would seem that is a service that should still be offered, if for no other reason that customer good-will. What Leo mentions about purchasers getting a preference because of past experience is very true.

[Bruce Cloutier]

The main concern here still surrounds the fragility of the certificates. That being a software aspect that could render the expensive physical hardware useless which is a serious concern once support for the product expires. The only real solution is to send someone back in time to offer insight to the committee and influence the original standards. But changing the past would alter now and what would that feel like?

I agree with Steve as to the "Right to Own" observation.

Thanks Tony for the compliment.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The main concern here still surrounds the fragility of the certificates. That being a software aspect that could render the expensive physical hardware useless which is a serious concern once support for the product expires. The only real solution is to send someone back in time to offer insight to the committee and influence the original standards. But changing the past would alter now and what would that feel like?

I agree with Steve as to the "Right to Own" observation.

Thanks Tony for the compliment.

Fortunately, DCI generates the Certificates, not the manufactures. All the Certs I have upgraded have had a three day wait time because of this...

[Harold Hallikainen]

Fortunately, DCI generates the Certificates, not the manufactures. All the Certs I have upgraded have had a three day wait time because of this...

I don't know about that. At USL, we had a locked room with only a couple people having access. The equipment to "key" media blocks was in there. Then there was a large fenced area that was similarly restricted with test and burn in racks for media blocks. And cameras all over the place.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Just relaying what GDC told me...

[Marcel Birgelen]

The main concern here still surrounds the fragility of the certificates. That being a software aspect that could render the expensive physical hardware useless which is a serious concern once support for the product expires. The only real solution is to send someone back in time to offer insight to the committee and influence the original standards. But changing the past would alter now and what would that feel like?

I'd say, it's twofold:

- The fragility of most current private key storage solutions.
- The expiry of certificates and the abandonment of the products by the manufacturer.

The root of all of this is the security requirements of DCI.

While in the beginning, when all of this digital cinema stuff was new, the bandwidths we're dealing with was still a challenge and required sophisticated solutions like high-speed custom-built mediablocks, that was all about 15 to 20 years ago. Those same bandwiths and the processing power required for 2K and 4K cinema, are pretty trivial for modern-day computing equipment. Yet, as a niche, we're locked into a corner, because of the DCI security requirements. Those really are the root of all evil, because that locks the entire industry to a small subset of expensive niche products, by just a handful of manufacturers who remain comitted to the market.

Meanwhile, no DCI security theater has ever stopped anybody at simply pointing their 4K recording device at the screen. Cinema-exclusive release windows have shrunk to almost nothing and those same studios that still require cinemas to adhere to those draconian security standards, are happy to dump much of their content on their streaming platforms on day zero.

If DCI would be allowed to move to a more reasonable, broader adapted industry-standard security schema, the industry could benefit more from the current developments in the audio-visual space and we would be less confined in product choice than we're now.