Hello,
I have a use case to develop a system that displays a countdown (in seconds) to an upcoming event. I can use an information event/correlation to set the upcoming event datetime in the new protocol. I'm looking for suggestions on how to generate the countdown with fair accuracy and minimal processing load. One thought was a timer that runs a qaction that calculates the difference between the event time and server time, but the timer would have to run multiple times a second and I am concerned if that would be a resource issue.
Eventually this protocol/app will send the countdown time to an external device via serial over IP.
And ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Sorry – some other questions that kind of crossed my mind on this one. Where is your Start Time coming from? Is that a booking in DataMiner, or data that you ingest from a 3rd party system through another element? Because you mention an information message to pass on that information.
Hi Ben! The countdown timeframe will be limited to 5 minutes or so, basically time until coming out of a commercial break. The timer will show seconds, but would like it to be accurate to .5s or less. The start time is coming from a playout automation playlist element that gets an unsolicited update everytime the playlist changes or moves to the next event. The logic is:
Is active playlist event a non live input type (commercial), if yes then find next event (row sorted by start time) that is a live event and set this as the countdown time.
My thought was to generate an information event every time the playlist moves, then run an automation to perform the logic above. The other option would be to add the above logic in to the playlist protocol (Evertz Mediator Nexus) but given that this is kind of a unique use case doing it outside the protocol seems to be the better option.
Hi Jim,
Based on your explanation, a custom connector is the best place to implement the countdown logic.
You will need to create a parameter to hold the real-time value of the countdown clock, which you can then display in a Visio shape.
Since you want to track the remaining seconds until the next event, you will probably need more than one counter running simultaneously for different events. However, I understand these counters are not running all the time and will need to be started and stopped as part of the event workflow.
Implementing this in a custom connector unique to your solution will be better to have complete flexibility.
Email me if you want to explore this idea in more detail.
Interesting case Jim. Just to get more context, what kind of overall count-down time frame are we talking about? Is this count down starting days, or hours, or minutes ahead of the event? What kind of granularity are you aiming for, sounds like down to the second?