Re: Let¡¯s have a candid conversation.
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Lee!
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Always a pleasure my friend.?
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Unfortunately, vendors were cloning the hard drive and deploying the server on an isolated network so it did not know what it did not know.?
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My initial though is they could tie the license to the chip ID, but this does not work for HA deployment.? I ran into this with Polycom servers in an enterprise VM environment.? We had a datacenter go down
and failover, well¡ failed because it refused to spin up on the new virtual machine.
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They are looking into using a USB key, but this does not solve licensing for virtual instances.? Quite the conundrum indeed.
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-Noah
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It figures the one topic that would draw both of us out of the silent viewing is VC-4!
I appreciate your view and now see a perspective I'm not considering.
Lee Baker
Crestron Biamp Extron & more
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On Fri, Sep 9, 2022 at 9:59 AM wnsanders <wnsanders@...> wrote:
What I¡¯m reading here seems to be mostly fear of change.? Having worked on the client side for over a decade, and in high-dollar residential for two,
I can tell you VC-4 is a product our clients have been wanting for a long time.?
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It¡¯s a solution that can be deployed globally as a hardware box, or VM in the cloud, that is managed like other IT resources.? This architecture gives
them visibility and control over AV equipment on their network instead of it being a collection of mystery boxes on their network (if they even allow it).? Deployed on a segmented AV VLAN or sub-network it¡¯s a powerful leap forward from the Flintstone black-box
solution the AV industry seems so attached to.
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With this said, Crestron has a major conundrum with the licensing.? Upon initial release there was no ¡°phone home¡± requirement.? What they found is
integrators were essentially pirating VC-4 and they took measures to protect their intellectual property.? Leave it to the few bad to screw things up for the good.?
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Key issues needing a resolution.
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HA (High-Availability) ¨C Currently it¡¯s a manual process to reboot or spin up another instance if the server goes down.? If the whole house or multiple offices are running on a server then it needs the ability to be deployed as a super clustered pair of servers
with auto failover.
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Evolved Software Theft Protection ¨C I think they can take a page from the non-linear audio/video editing industry here (without the torrent issues).? There is also no reason a client cannot set this up in a DMZ with limited access to the licensing server.?
LAN/WAN teams do this on a regular basis with a multitude of products.
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Linux ¨C Would really like to see them develop a version that runs on Red Hat, but that would mean the licensing would have to go up in price.
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Best,
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Noah
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To the many points made, this is why I actually prefer a used 3-series/purpose-built appliance to the concept of VC4/3rd-Party 'commodity' hardware
(then update to 4-series when available)
Frankly for most residential systems, 3-series is fine IMO.
At the very least, there will be a pretty long learning curve for VC4 as we find all the things that are 'different' with it vs a dedicated processor.
It may be the way to go long-term, but I'm always warry of the modern attitude of 'new is cool and thus better' (Largely driven by Marketing departments).
My experience is that most new stuff is not thought through very well compared to past times (showing my age here!) and this is one of the reasons that things seem to have a shelf life in 'minutes' not years...
From my perspective, the cost of developing for the 'catch of the day' is higher than can be rightly amortized.
And at the end of the day, the things we're doing are pretty much the same things we did 20 years ago - there just seems to be a desire to do old things in a new way so that it seems more exciting, but not really different...
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