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   16 Button DVD Controller - Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge

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BCD VC-16a

The Original BCD Button Box

  
Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge
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The Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge - wild, rugged and weathered - is a symbol of the old west standing at the threshold of modern times.  For centuries, this remarkable land was the province of a few nomadic hunters and food gatherers.  Today the refuge serves all Americans by conserving part of our nations heritage.

The Assignment
For several years, the Refuge Visitor Center had two laserdisc players playing two copies of the same disc in two exihibits: Terrascope and Prescribed Fires in the Wilderness.  The Terrascope is an autostart/auto-repeat 1-minute video that shows prairie dogs underground.   Prescribed Fires in the Wilderness is in two versions, one with captions and one without. Terrascope played unattended and the LD player showing Prescribed Fires... was operated by a controller which detected one of two pushbuttons. The LD players would frequently fail and the controller company was out of business. BCD's assignment was to duplicate the functionality of these displays using DVD.

Designing the System
Terrascope would have been an easy auto-loop segment, but the disc also needed to have the Prescribed Fire... segments. For the Prescribed Fires... exhibit, the system should skip over Terrascope and be prepared to accept a button press from the user.

Disc Geography

  • Terrascope
    This was a Menu with two Pre-Command menu "1" and "2". If no choice was selected, the video repeated forever. Either of the two choices branched to the Attract Loop.
  • Attract Loop
    Previously, the Prescribed Fire... video screen was blank/black when the video was not showing. BCD suggested using an Attract Loop made up of 7 still images grabbed from the video. Each image of this slide show lasts for 10 seconds, and the sequence repeats if no button is pressed. This sequence is also a Menu with the "1" and "2" options. Option #1 plays the regular Prescribed Fires... video, and Option #2 plays the version with captions.
  • Prescribed Fires... (2 segments)
    Each of these two segments were ordinary DVD Video (.VOB) files. The Post-command on each automatically takes the viewer back to the Attract Loop.
Disc Player Oddities
The Laserdisc video was dubbed to BetaSP, encoded using the Zapex encoder with Dolby Digital®, multiplexed, authored, and premastered with DVDmotion, and recorded with a Pioneer DVR-S201 (all except Zapex available from BCD). While the title played well on our emulator, the client's Sony DVD-NS4000 DVD player insisted on putting up a blue bar and a number on the monitor whenever we pressed <1><Enter> or <2><Enter> to select a Prescribed Fire... scene from the Attract Screen. There was no way to turn off this "feature".

By testing with the remote control, we determined that the Sony Previous and Return commands did not display this blue bar, so the disc was remastered using Previous and Return instead of <1> and <2>. The only VC-16 custom programming performed by BCD for this project was to issue the Return command upon power-up so that the player would skip the Terrascope video and go directly to the Attract Loop. (NOTE: Now, custom programming is not required with the release of the Field/Flash Firmware update. We use the programmable macros instead.)

Note: March 2002 - The Sony NS4000 player had repeated difficulty with Disc is Dirty messages. Professional cleaning of the laser lens yielded only temporary satisfaction. The player was replaced with a Panasonic DVD-32K and at last report, was working well.

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