Doremi TMS V1.4.11 SMPTE content

[Michael Richardson]

I am working on a bunch of automations for my theatre, that uses doremi Showvaults and an older Dell r710 with TMS V1.4.11. We've been told we cant upgrade this at all to support SMPTE content, that we can only purchase something new. I have automations built around several things, such as automatically taking care and notifying me of missing KDMs, automatically making playlists and ingesting them into the proper locations, and then of course when my scripts automatically schedule everything, the TMS makes sure everything is ingested and shows a warning if something isnt. This works semi well, except for a few things. Currently with SMPTE content, it shows up on the TMS if it is on the Showvaults. This works well enough, but transferring movies and trailers is fairly slow this way, So I am hoping to instead use server with a SSD array and a big boy NIC so I can ingest movies to all my projectors, and use that server as an Ingest station/nas. In my testing however, this doesnt see all SMPTE content. It seems to see some, but not all, and no actual films. Does anyone have any recommendations on how I can get this to work? I can see there is a maps folder that the TMS tries to access when it scans the NAS for content, and I see this on the Showvaults when I connect to FTP, but I dont know how these files are generated(especially the idx files). I'm open to any recommendations, whether its to the TMS, to generating some maps so the SMPTE content shows up on the TMS, or anything like that. I've looked into just throwing a 10G nic in a showvault and upgrading to SSDs so hopefully it can ingest to many other theatres at the same time but this doesnt seem like the best idea. As far as I can tell the showvaults don't support TRIM, nor am I sure they would play well with 2TB drives or an added SFP NIC

[Steve Guttag]

I think that there is another issue brewing with the Doremi (Dolby) TMS...that it is coming up on a hard cutoff date or something. I don't have any in the field but I seem to recall reading something about that in a dealer bulletin. I suggest researching that to ensure that the TMS will be functional beyond December of this year or next.

You should probably start looking into current TMS systems. There are many out there that will do all or part of what you are seeking. Including Cine Digital Manager (probably the lowest cost), GDC TMS2000 (offers a couple of ways of handling show builds), Arts Alliance Media's Screenwriter and Comscore's ACE. Screenwriter and ACE are definitely all about being fully automated. You choose your content packs for ads and trailers, it will take care of show builds and such.

CineDigital Manager will make you feel at home as their UI looks like the Doremi DCP2000...right down to the Romper Room colors.

[Leo Enticknap]

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My understanding is that this applies to earlier versions of the Doremi TMS, as well. The bottom line is that anyone using these TMS systems will at the very least have to replace the software by the end of next year, and unless the actual computer is pretty new, it would very likely make sense to replace it as well.

I've installed 2TB SSDs in IMS2000s and 3000s and they work just fine. An IMS2000 will give you a warning, because it's looking for SMART parameters specific to spinning rust drives that don't exist on an SSD, but a RAID of SSDs still works. The IMS2000 uses almost identical SMS software to the ShowVault, and so I would guess that the chances are good that you'd be OK. Adding an SFP NIC would be a much more tricky proposition, I suspect, because you'd likely have to go under the hood of the Linux installation to install a driver for it.

[Michael Richardson]

I'll start looking for something new. I've always wondered if I could bond the 2 network ports together into a bond and just assign the 2 IPs I need to have some extra bandwidth. What SSDs have you used?