Anthony Piantine

I work at non profit serving people with disabilities in the Midwest US primarily through summer camp and we recently built a 100 capacity cinema with the help of Marcus theaters. I am looking to build a media playback/Theater Management server to accomplish the following goals Dolby decoding with 8 Channel Digital AES/EBU audio output(Preferably a db25 connector) Flawless Video output to Panasonic EZ570 projector (Seems like I always have handshake issues with HDMI) Either Dual Monitor or a remote GUI for playback control and monitoring Blu-ray Optical Drive 4TB Raid (Potentially an SSD for acceleration?) SSD boot drive What Im worried about with using a PC for playback is that I do not ever want to see the desktop or any cue that could indicate that it is a computer sending video to the projector. Is it possible (I know its not necessarily a hardware question.. at least I don't think) to have one of the screens in a dual monitor system to not be accessible by anything but a certain program, etc? So it would basically be black unless a program specifically sent video to that display. So in the end it would not be possible to drag a window over to it, see the desktop or move your mouse onto it. Can you set your bios to output to the on board graphics then somehow also send content to a dedicated GPU? I've never messed around with an SSD accelerated (correct term?) RAID nor do I know if it would even help in this instance. I am fairly comfortable programming and have begun writing a media player software that fits my needs: Light weight and reliable If no content then screen should be black Very custom scaling options (I am projecting with a 16:10 projector onto a 21:9 screen) Blu-ray playback Externally controlled playlist(To set the preroll, main film, and post credits video order) Scheduled If you know of any software that comes even close to fitting my needs I'd love to hear about it I also may do "theater management" through this server. Basically just automation of the whole show. All of our lighting is DMX controllable and the projector as well as some other audio components have serial and network control. I may have the server control everything or I may for the sake of stability have an Arduino control the individual components and have the Server only control the Arduino over serial. Haven't decided for sure on that yet. Like I said we are a non profit so "low" cost is important(I know I'm asking for a lot). I will probably end up doing everything from used parts. I thought about getting a server on Ebay as the cost to performance seems to be very good and the Size/Noise of a server is no problem. Assuming the server was 1 or 2u I would probably get a different case to fit everything I need. Any help/input would be greatly appreciated.

I have a 2016 MacBook Pro and I've been trying to create a FreeNAS boot drive for a NAS box I have. I am using Unetbootin to create the drive. I am selecting my own .iso file. I've tried both 11.1 and 11.2 as well as tried to create a DBAN drive. The drive is successfully created but the PC doesn't seem to recognize that it is bootable no matter which iso I use. Its an 8gb sandisk drive that I have used to install OS before. Any help would be greatly appreciated

I just installed Plex on my freeNAS box and when I go into the management page for the plugin it lets me login. Then the screen says looking for servers and that a server could not be found. Which seems dumb. seeing as how that very message is coming from a PLEX server any ideas?

I just installed Plex on my freeNAS box and when I go into the management page for the plugin it lets me login. Then the screen says looking for servers and that a server could not be found. Which seems dumb. seeing as how that very message is coming from a PLEX server any ideas?

I did try a bios reset. No luck. I think thats what I will do for now unless you guys have any more ideas. Ill shoot him a text and see what comes of it. Thanks for all the help so far

Yes, video did output with the previous owner. And he used the PCIe slot for the card. Yeah, I did turn it to IGD. Same result. I also have tried with Plug N Player both On and Off

No, the previous owner used windows

Yeah, it can. I can log into the GUI. Do anything in there. The NAS even shows up on my network and I can write files to it. No there isn't that I could find. I though that was really weird that their wasn't.

that's supposed to say Can't. Apparently I can't type If that card is installed I get no Video signal at all.

I bought the system used and it came with with the RAID controller. Rather than buy a couple HBA cards I figured I would run this guy JBOD. It support 12 or 16 drives I believe which is what Im hoping to expand to. I do know that it works though as the previous owner ran the same config with windows installed rather. I assume its not an OS thing as I can even view the BIOS settings. This card also does for sure support FreeBSD

Hardware: Intel E5300 Asus P5QL-VM Mobo 4gb DDR2(will be upgraded) 4 WD 4tb Data Center HDDs 500gb boot drive hdd Adaptec 31205 Raid Controller To start off my day I had wiped drives. No OS I tried to see if it would POST without any OS installed and I had no video signal. I unplugged the 4 4tb drives from the controller. Still no luck I completely removed the controller. POSTed fine with video signal and all I installed FreeNAS thinking maybe it would do something. Still no luck when card is installed. The system is working because freeNAS loads up and I can log into the Web GUI, there just isn't any video signal when I do it. Any Ideas? Thanks

I definitely wouldn't ever expect you to do that I have experience coding and am fairly comfortable figuring it out. Just wanted to make sure it is a possibility. If I ran OpenMediaVault could I still have such a script run?

ha, yeah that's not nearly as cool Could we do the auto-ingest then? I am definitely willing to work around the issues that it would bring.

what do you mean

The reason that the auto copy is not the best solution is that we often times will have multiple projects on a Card at a time and will only need to transfer some of the files. I've never used linux before but would have no problem learning a new OS. If I did run linux, could you help me/guide me through making such a script?