NTR Lab

Moscow, Russia



Date: January 23, 2009



To: Xperinet MIRV Customers and Dealers



Subject: MIRV Technical Support Program



NTR Labs is pleased to announce a global program for supporting the MIRV line of video server products.



As you know, Xperinet closed its doors in July of last year, and since then very limited support has been available from the contract manufacturer and from dealers. NTR is pleased to offer this opportunity for you to receive support from the engineers who designed and built the system. We have crafted this program at the request of some of the former management team at Xperinet. Following is a description of the program.



The MIRV support program provides technical engineering expertise to diagnose hardware issues and to resolve software issues with the system.
Please note this program does NOT cover replacement of hardware. If a hardware component has failed, you will need to either replace the item with commercially available off-the-shelf parts, or seek warranty repair service from the contract manufacturer, FutureIT.



MIRV support is provided on a pay-as-you-go basis. An initial deposit
of
$294 is required by each customer to register their system. Each time
a
technical support request is received, your account will be debited $1.50 per minute for the time required by the technician to solve the issue.
There is a minimum charge per incident of $4.50.



You can enroll into a program by sending an inquiry to [email protected]. Our manager will advice you of the further actions.



Support requests are submitted by sending an email to [email protected]. You will need the following information, so be sure to keep this data on hand:

q Customer ID

q Customer password

q Outside IP address

q Description of the problem



You will also need to have port forwarding set up to enable remote access.
If you are unsure how to arrange this, send us an email, and we can send you
instructions. If the system will not boot, we will provide you with a
document that details several steps you can take to diagnose the problem.



NTR engineers will communicate with you via e-mail and chat. Because MIRV customers span all 24 time zones, it is not possible for us to establish business hours that will fit all regions. You should expect that responses
will take 12 to 24 hours during business days. We are hoping to
establish
live chat and phone support hours in the future. This will depend on the number of persons enrolling in the program, and the geographic concentration of these customers. So we encourage everyone to enroll early -- don't wait until there is a support requirement.



MIRV support is provided by Senior level Engineers who have a minimum of
12
years software coding experience. We are not staffing this support function with junior people, I am sure you will be pleased with their level of expertise. You should be aware; however, that our engineers are not familiar with many of the other electronic systems you install along side the MIRV, so be sure to provide a detailed description of any related equipment in your support request.



Support Limits. The following describes limits on our support capability under this program:

1.If a hardware failure is diagnosed, we will recommend
replacement
hardware and provide basic instructions for replacement.
2.If a replacement system disc is needed, we will provide you with
instructions on how to make a new system disc. We may not have images for some older equipment.
3.We support the API to the extent that we ensure the device is
responding appropriately to each API command. Support for the specific Crestron or AMX modules should be directed to the consultants who created those modules.
4.Systems must have Internet access with port forwarding enabled
to
facilitate our work.



To register your product, navigate to the NTR web site and complete the registration page. (The support registration page will be up soon, and we will send you a link.) You will need a credit card to pay for your initial deposit, or you can use PayPal. Please note support credits have no expiration date.



I know many customers are unhappy that they must pay for support given their product should still be under warranty from Xperinet. Please understand that NTR was a mere contractor of Xperinet, and was not an affiliate company. NTR took no share in the profits on the sale of MIRV systems, and in fact was left with a very large unpaid invoice when Xperinet closed.
We
are providing this support program in the hope that it will help some MIRV owners. It is my sincere hope this program is helpful to you.



NTR Lab has been in operation for 8 years, with offices in Moscow, Tomsk and Novokuznetsk, Russia. We employ over 60 software engineers, and have customer list of over 300 companies spanning 4 continents. If you have any additional requirements for software development, please feel free to contact us.



Sincerely,



NTR Lab

Nick Mikhailovsky

President

Note! Marc at Future IT was kind of put off by having his company mentioned in this Russian blurb, I know that NTR is a legitimate company, I just dont know who is behind all of this, maybe John Cox skipped the country and is trying to start over in Russia ? who knows. Although we have been able to solve most of the problems with Xperinet on our own and with a lot of help from a former Xperinet Employee, I am personaly pushing forward with the conversion to MythTV on my clients machines.

How are you going about this? Does it provide more robust operation or does it just enable you to update the system to play the latest movies? Is there a compelling reason if someone has an Experinet system to do this?

I do not have Experinet but know of several people that have them and they are lucky if they don't have to reboot once a day..

are they going to provide software upgrades for enryption issues?

I dont know the answer to this, I sent them an email asking this question but have not heard back yet.

Xperinet is in fact the old version of mythtv, which they spent countless thousdands of dollars to fix and patch, and is esentialy stuck back at fedora 6, where as mythtv was rebuilt and runs on fedora 10 and a few other engines like buntu, it has up to date decryption and is a lot more stable, plus any upgrades you would need are constantly in the works and essentialy free to anyone to download. as far as the hardware goes its just a SATA raid 5 setup, the older units are mostly IDE with Xperinet prod 3.4, the older models wont run Xperinet prod 4.0 as that only works well with SATA drives. and you are stuck with the motherboard and the Nvidia card because you cant change the drivers, but all this does not matter with Myth TV becuse you can just add what ever drivers you need

Well I just got this email back and it does not sound very promising

Hello David,

thank you for your interest in our program!

So far we are not offering software updates beyond Prod 4.0, we only support older versions of MIRV.

However, we do have plans of developing updates in the future in case there is a big number of persons interested.



If you or any of your customers decide to enroll on the MIRV Tech Support program, please follow this instruction:

First of all, you need to fill out a form at http://mirvsupport.ntrlab.com/ .
Please choose the enter for clients. After you do so, I will create an account for you. The next step for you is to make a deposit of $294, and then I will give you your login details.



Hope you find this useful. Please do not hesitate to ask any questions.

Best regards,
Polina
Manager
NTR Lab

Sounds like a good way to send $294 to Russia only to receive a big FU for it..

I knew from the beginning that it was Myth, they didn't even bother to create their own GUI at first until people started asking about it.. From what I have seen they didn't spend their countless thousands of dollars in the right place..

That being said, what would the steps be to convert? I can't say I am knowledgable about the workings of Linux or whatever it is running on. Is it the same process to go into an Xperinet platform, get into the OS and following the same installation steps from MythTV to install?

In a few weeks I will be able to answer these questions, as we are building a test machine and client right now, the two big questions are #1 if we simply put mythtv on an Xperinet machine, what would it do about movie content already recorded to the array? And #2 would Myth TV simply go hey look a preexisting version do you want to update it.


The first question is the biggest, as the movies are stored in the raid but the cover art and other related info is shared with the OS drive, which depending on the age of the unit is a little SATA or IDE 2.5 laptop drive.


Now I am kind of sure that new myth wont merge with old myth, so this would be a boot from ISO disc completely writing over the existing OS drive in the machine, I think that myth will see the movie content, but we may have to individually go to each movie and tell it to load cover and details for each, or it may just try to do it on its own, I just don’t know yet.


Note! Movies that are bad for Xperinet don’t try to load these


Batman the dark night

The Express (wont even work in DVD shrink)

Walle


Most of the movies that won’t load in Xperinet you can run through DVD Shrink or DVD FAB and then take the copy you make and put that in Xperinet and it will load fine.

There are others that will cause a black screen condition, wherein you have to do a CTRL F12 to shut the machine down,, Don’t use CNTRL ALT DELETE this is actually bad for some machines restart the machine without the disc in it, if you can get it out. If your screen is still black hit CNTRL F3 for component or CNTRL F6 for HDMI wait for it to reboot and you will be good again.

Any luck in this? I am interested in other people experiences with this, we are considering the same thing.

Jimmy

I am currently an employee of Future IT. My name is Branden. How's the mythtv build going David? Just wanted to let anyone dealing with Xperinet that there is a FAQ document that may have some information in providing fixes. If you would like a copy of it you can email me at [email protected]. As far as NTR labs goes I am not to for sure on how they would be able to offer any type of support on these units with out either currently working with someone who was an employee of xperinet or they were somehow involved in the original creation of the product possibly.

We were not by any means responsibly for any of there software. We were simply the manufacture/builders of there servers. They created the software and would give us a "clone"/copy on a hard drive to then mass copy for the particular system we needed it for. I may be contacting NTR labs to see if they can solve a new issue that has been coming up here lately for a few customers. The latest issue is no sound. We did have a sound fix that would solve this problem but it doesn't work. If from a command line you run a OSStest you get audio output to the speakers. But when you try and play a dvd/cd either from the tray or in the library you get no audio. If I end up contacting NTR Labs I will keep you updated on/ if they were able to help and my overall experience with them. But if you do have any questions feel free to send me over an email I may or may not be able to help with the resources I currently have available.

Branden

This is a bummer, I was going to use the audio fix. Sounds like we will have to clone some drives, but that wont stop it from happening again. Wish I knew which disc(s) it was that was loaded causing the audio failure this time, I would just delete the disc. Or as you just indicated in your email the new machine downloaded the update and lost audio. It has to be that the audio settings were reset to factory so the output settings need to be checked and the play back preferences also need to be checked

I have machines here that are set to "factory default" settings and still are having issues. I am currently working on re-imaging a server. I will pull the network cable to make sure that nothing auto updates during boot up. Do the configurations that need to be done and test the sound. Hopefully it works. if so I will then update the system from 3.4 up to 4.0 and see what happens.

In the mean time I will take a server with content already installed on it and install a fresh copy of MythDora and see if I am still able to access the content on the drive. I should have more answer towards the end of this week.

Thats what it looks like to me.