MediaBin / FlipFactory Integration

dudamic

Dear all,
we are currently in the process of setting up an integration of MediaBin with FlipFactory. It would be great to exchange experience and transcoding tasks between MediaBin and FlipFactory, as our knowldge of video handling is still a basic one.

Thanks

Michael

lyman

Well in many cases everything goes smoothly :-), but when it doesn't here are some general guidelines where to look! I will abbreviate as I assume the documentation as background, but here are some tips.

There are three basic types of error:

"FlipFactory must be installed to repurpose video."

This indicates that the MediaBin was unable to start the FlipFactory message process. Probable cause is that the set-up steps in which one informs MediaBin where to find the Java executable or the classpath is incorrect. If you enable the prim.log it will give the actual command line being invoked. Often the problem will be apparent by inspection (I have seen typos cause havoc) or one can try running a similar command line at a command prompt.

"Error returned from FlipFactory."

A message was sent to FlipFactory and it did not like it! Again looking at the actual command line helps (classpath problems may manifest this way). The log written by the message program called flipflop.log and located in the MediaBin installdir is the best source for these problems.

"FlipFactory did not return an output file."

This means that FlipFactory is installed correctly and accepted the message but at process termination no file was returned. The most usual culprit is that the FlipFactory factory was misconfigured and it simply put the output in the wrong directory. At this point it is useful to look at the FlipFactory console application where you can see if it finished the job successfully. Also there are logs on the FlipFactory server generated by Telestream and not MediaBin (as I recall they look like engine0.log, engine1.log...) that can be useful.

One of the harder cases we found to track down was when someone had made an error in the message.xml file, however there was good evidence in the Telestream logs.

While the coordination does involve some work to set up, the functionality is really very powerful. Many new capabilities are added to MediaBin in a seamless (to the outside user) manner and I strongly encourage anyone interested in video repurposing not to be scared to undertake looking into this.

Cheers,

Lyman Hurd

PS Anyone else chiming in please be specific as to your MediaBin version. We have made the logging more and more explicit with each release!