Kiel the Coder

Burnt

I haven’t written a word in months because my work schedule has eaten away at my mornings and evenings. The workload has been insane since last year. I do miss writing; it’s a good outlet for maintaining my sanity.

I have ideas rattling around that I’d still like to explore, and I think this blog is still a good place to do that. But I can’t bring myself to stay on a computer any longer than I have to after putting in 12 to 14 hours everyday. I’m mentally exhausted at the end of the day, and I don’t want to spend any more time away from family either.

Our industry ebbs and flows, it always has. It’s hard to track from one year to the next when the busiest times will be. I’ve had distinct memories of suffering through March–trying to close out fiscal year business–but I’ve also had other years where end of summer turned into a death-march–trying to get things lined up for 4th quarters. The whole of 2023 was brutal and the project schedule continued right into 2024 without any let up.

I’m taking 15 minutes to write this for 3 reasons:

I miss writing
I’m waiting for a callback
The techs I’m supporting across 3 jobs today are all busy working on something else

I do think things are getting better. I would like to spend time thinking about project planning and schedules and to figure out how to stay out of this situation, but that’s asking to fix a lot of things that are out of my control. I can only control my actions.

Thank you for reading.

Crestron Masters 2024

Masters 2024 is a wrap! Great sessions this year. The 3 hour blocks worked well to cover topics with just enough lecture and lab.

Fixing Home Movies with FFmpeg

My dad converted a bunch of old taped home movies to MP4 and gave them to me for Christmas. I copied them all to my Plex server since I thought having them on-demand would be pretty cool. Unfortunately, a lot of them ended up rotated 90 degrees and–surprisingly–there’s no way to tell Plex to rotate on playback.

I kept thinking there’s got to be an easy way to fix the rotated movies so they play back correctly on my TV. And then I remembered the Swiss Army Knife of video playback tools: FFmpeg.

VC-4-PC-3 Wi-Fi

We have a customer that will not allow the VC-4 to connect to their corporate network, but there is a guest wireless network that would easily allow the VC-4 to check in with XIO Cloud. I asked Crestron if there was a way to enable the wireless adapter so I could join it to the guest Wi-Fi but was told it was disabled in BIOS.

The Future of AV Programming: Part 7

2023 is coming to an end, and I’m so glad. This year has felt like I’ve stumbled out of one bad project right into the next. It’s been a constant battle of double-booking, short timelines, and delayed product. Everyone’s unhappy.

I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the challenges this year, but also to weave in my thoughts on where this is all headed in Part 7 of my Future of AV Programming saga.

Crestron + ZRC

Last time, I hinted that I wanted to explore connecting Crestron to Zoom Room Controls. I mostly run into this setup when a customer is replacing their video conference systems with Zoom rooms.

The scenario I’ll explore is: the user has a DMPS they’d like to continue using. They also want to be able to route non-computer sources to the displays once in a while (such as a cable TV box). They want to have 3 favorite channels available in Zoom. The user should have some flexibility to change the Zoom Room Controls without needing to touch the Crestron program (say they want to add another source).

Tools of the Trade

Being in the field again for the past week has been a good reminder that every AV programmer should equip themselves with some essential tools. I foolishly cleaned out my backpack last week because I wanted to have an easier time passing through security at the airport. Normally I take everything out of my backpack, dump it into my checked bag, then when I get where I’m going, transfer everything back into my backpack. Oh well, lesson learned.

Zoom Room Controls

Considering that I want to start small with some new posts, I thought a good topic is Zoom room controls. These are quick and easy to use once you know the configuration file structure, and sometimes you don’t even need a physical control processor! Isn’t that where all of this is headed anyway?

On the Road… Again

I’m traveling for work for two weeks, so I won’t have access to my normal equipment while I’m gone. It’s probably a good time to update on my previous post about setting up a VC-4 instance using a virtual private server (VPS).

Start Small

It’s been a while! My workload hasn’t slowed down any, and this blog has had to take a backseat until I get caught up. So this post will be very brief and about a single idea, one that works for many types of problems: start small.