[John Vaudin]

In any CatDV Server prior to 7 the MySQL database basically has to be called ‘catdv’.

If you really need to call it something else you need to manually edit the first few lines of (a cppy of) the create-catdv.sql script you’ll find in the CatDV server install directory and then run it manually.

Alternatively upgrade to Server 7 🙂

John

[John Vaudin]

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “the client(or role) can’t see the file given it is so large” – do you mean the video can’t stream reliably from the storage? And that’s why you want to use proxies?

Assuming that’s what you mean then no – you should not have a separate catalog for the proxies. You should have a parallel directory that contains your proxy media, and you should set up a path mapping rule (in Prefs -> Media Search Paths) to map the root of you media folder to the root of the proxy folder.

CatDV will try and play the original media by default, but you can right-click the player to choose to play the proxy (or switch on the old thumbnails/proxy/original tabs).

[John Vaudin]

That looks right I must admit. Could you email support@squarebox.com please, attaching a log (use Help -> Error Log -> Save Log Files..) and we’ll get someone to dial in take a look.

[John Vaudin]

That looks plausible. You don’t need the rules with the backslashes in, but that shouldn’t break anything.

I can see that the stored path is a Mac path. What is the full Windows path of the same file?

[John Vaudin]

CatDV stores the file path from the machine where the file was originally ingested. You can see what it stores in the Media Path field. If that path is Mac path and you try and view the catalog on a Windows machine then it won’t be able to find the file.

To fix that, CatDV has path mapping rules, that you can set up in Prefs -> Media Search Paths. Simply add a rule that maps the Mac path (usually something like /Volumes/Media to it equivalent Windows path e.g. M:\Media – or whatever). In a mixed Mac/Windows environment you’ll need two rules – one for Mac to Windows and one from Windows to Mac.

[John Vaudin]

It looks like the the definition of a Check Box or Radio Button field in the prefs you’re importing is incorrect. Specifically they are missing the values embedded in the field name. For Radion buttons the name of the field needs to be something like –

Weather:Sunny:Raining:Windy

Where the first field is the actual name and the others are the values that field can have.

[John Vaudin]

In terms of playback, the original format shouldn’t matter (although it may well impact what transcoding technology / settings you need) the important thing will be the target format. The older CatDV Web Client defaulted to using the QuickTime player in the browser, so could play back many QuickTime formatted files directly, but as support for plugins is removed from popular browsers, and is not typically available on mobile devices, so we have had to move with the times and migrate over to using the HTML5 video player component.

Using the HTML5 player component means that the supported proxy formats will depend entirely on what browser/device you are using. However, by far the most widely supported format is MP4 (H.264/AAC). This format should work on most browsers/devices, though sadly even this is not guaranteed to work in absolutely all platforms/browsers, as the H.264 codec is patent encumbered and therefore cannot be included in some strictly open source browsers.

Going forward expect to see support for multiple proxy formats, so that the correct format can be served out to different browsers/hosts – but that isn’t currently supported.

[John Vaudin]

I’m afraid I’m not really clear what your question is. Do you have CatDV Server? Have you tried using any of the web interfaces?

In terms of proxies on AWS, you can serve your proxies from the cloud, but they need to served with a consistent path structure, so you can’t store individual proxy files as S3 objects. You need a web server essentially, that can publish all your proxies in a folder hierarchy that matches you media store. You then set the Alternative URL field in the server path mapping for your proxies, to point to the root of the proxy web server.

[John Vaudin]

It’s not clear from your question whether you currently have CatDV Server? If you do then you just need a web license and you can make your catalogs accessible using the built-in web server and the new Web 2 interface (you need Server 6.10 for that). Alternatively if you want tighter integration into your existing web site then there is sample code provided to show how to create bespoke web pages that query the CatDV database and display the results in whatever form you like. Obviously that requires some web development skills, but it’s quite straightforward.

You probably want to think carefully about connecting your main CatDV Server to the public Internet though. We recommend at least using a separate web server in a DMZ or ideally a completely separate read-only public CatDV Server instance, which only stores the proxies, so ensuring you valuable master media remain safe behind a firewall.

[John Vaudin]

Just to clarify. If you supply more than one search term then the default is to only return clips where ALL the terms are true. If you want to find clips where either one thing or the other is true then you need to tick the OR checkbox for all optional terms.