Monday 9 January 2017

Our Christmas list

Over the Christmas vacation the AV team have been busy making several changes to the equipment in teaching rooms.

Windows 10

Following the upgrade of a few rooms as a trial earlier in the year, all teaching rooms have now been upgraded to Windows 10. This will resolve a conflict between the In-Class Polling Tool (Turning Point Responseware), and PowerPoint when using Replay (the Lecture Capture system).

All software is available as before, but there are a few differences to be aware of:

Logging on

When you approach the computer it will show this screen:



Click the mouse, or press any key to get to the username and password screen:



Once you’ve entered your username and password you’ll be taken to the desktop:



Your first login may take slightly longer on a first log in as a new profile is generated. Any desktop icons will still be present, but shared drives may need to be remapped.

Web browser

The default browser is now Chrome. Although its profile doesn't roam between PCs you can sign into Chrome to sync your settings.


HDCP, bit depth and display power saving

We’ve made three changes to the video switchers that are present in about half of our rooms:
  1. We’ve disabled HDCP (High Definition Copy Protection) on the Laptop HDMI input cable, as it was causing problems with Replay (The Lecture Capture system). This means that content presented from Mac laptops should now record reliably, but connecting a copy protected source (ie a Blu-ray player) to the laptop input will fail. We have a workaround that we can implement for this if playback from a Blu-ray is required (please email us on avcentre@york.ac.uk if you'd like us to arrange this).
  2. We’ve changed a setting that relates to how the image from the PC is recognised. This should stop the frequent grey screens that have been a problem since an update was rolled out over summer.
  3. We’ve enabled a power saving setting, so that two minutes after all input signals are removed, the monitor will turn off. Waking the PC up again, or connecting a laptop will bring the monitor back on.

Replay: more rooms and new guidance

We’re also in the process of equipping D/L/047, D/L/116, D/N/104, C/A/107, C/A/130, C/A/140, K/111, PS/B/202, V/C/123 with the equipment required to use the Replay service, in addition to the rooms that will get Replay as part of the Christmas refurbishments. The software that runs the recording indicator lights has been updated to a more reliable version, and there's a new reminder label by each of the lights explaining what it means.

As ever, please get in touch on learning-spaces@york.ac.uk if you have any comments or questions.

Philip Stewart
Audio-Visual Manager

3 comments:

  1. What are the implication of this for video clips embedded in PowerPoint presentations?

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    Replies
    1. (replying on behalf of Philip)
      Presentations with embedded videos should still work fine. However, if the video clips are linked rather than embedded, and the links point to a shared filestore (not your personal H: or M: drives) then you will need to re-connect to the filestore (follow the instructions at https://goo.gl/d8qsyR ).

      Thanks

      Philip Stewart

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