From: Jason Clary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: Silence sensor for digital broadcasters?
What you need is a realplayer client derivative with hooks for detecting
disconnect and low audio frequency response. It would also need to auto
reconnect on failure and watch for excessive buffering, etc. Preferably
connecting at multiple preferred rates for surestream rtsp and pnm
broadcasts.
You could get part way there just by writing a VB app or something with
an embedded realplayer and watch for a disconnect event, but to do it
right you'd need to use the SDK to write a specialized service app, most
likely.
We are looking at doing something similar... We have a couple of 24-hour
"channels" that are a simulcast of what we put out on satellite. Having
a separate monitor machine that connects and watches the stream like any
other user that can notify a pager or something would be quite useful.
Jason S. Clary
INOC Administrator
PRIMEDIA Workplace Learning
-----Original Message-----
From: RealForum [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, August 02, 1999 4:30 PM
Subject: Re: Silence sensor for digital broadcasters?
From: Andrew Gilbert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Silence sensor for digital broadcasters?
This is relatively straightfoward on UNIX (cron job or resident script
with
sleep loop to do a ps and look for the server, restart or alarm if not
present).
NT is a little harder. I assume the platform is NT (clue being that the
server
crashes regularly). If this is the case you have to work a little
harder. The
server runs as an NT service. You can use the SCM to monitor service
status.
However, if the server crashes NT will likely pop up a dialog box and
wait for
a user acknowledge before the service truly goes away. This can mislead
the
monitor app into thinking the service is still running. You can overcome
this
by fiddling with Dr. Watson / registry key settings (don't remember the
specifics but it is possible to disable the debug hook that causes the
dialog
to pop. Or at least it is possible to insert your own handler for this
hook.).
Now at least when the server dies it dies and your monitor app can
reliably
know what is going on.
