'Ello Captains,
Derivative informs me that Notch Blocks don’t expose the duration/length of said block to media servers:
Why is this, and are there any plans to implement in the future? Thanks in advance.
I can confirm- using an Info CHOP on a Notch Block doesn’t report length.
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Yip, you’re right. Blocks don’t report track length to the host. It’s not quite as simple as you’d think as there are multiple modes for blocks to be in and depending on the mode you’d need to have a block-wide track length or per layer.
That said, it is something that is on our radar.
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Thanks Luke, happy to hear it’s on your radar. If I were you I would prioritize this; it’s an essential feature to any media server.
A Notch block without time duration info is like a comedy sketch with no punch line.
Ba dum tss
(In the meantime, I’ll possibly write a python script to solve for this and share it here once it’s been tested.)
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Hi Dylan,
Glad you found a potential workaround! We recognize that some features are more important to a select few users than others, and I guess there’s something specific to how TD users are used to working since we’ve been exporting Notch blocks for 5 years without this even being mentioned as any sort of critical feature. Thankfully, it has now been mentioned by you and at least another user so it’s on the list. It is not considered a high-priority item though, just to set some expectations.
Not sure how much this will help,
But I have been using a timer chop (well actually a LTC chop, but same idea) and pipeing runing the block on frame offset mode, and piping in the timer into that.
So I know exactly what frame or time I’m on and can sync multiple blocks to that one timer…
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@alonhammer22 that’s a great idea! I’m running this show using Timer CHOP with a similar approach. It’s quite easy to set segment duration manually from a table dat and control playback that way.
Mostly of note: my moviefilein tops get the media duration length via info chop, and they automatically populate/update my timer segment table with the exact durations. This is very necessary as client is swapping out media with their own playlists/etc.
For the Notch block, well, I’ve just had to forgo the intelligent system above and play dumb with it by setting the values manually. No big deal, just a bit of a bummer to not use the method universally, especially when that metadata is most certainly known and simply not being shared.