Dts css mayday

[Per Hauberg]

As I've been telling quite often, over the last year, -I've been collecting the necessary parts for reinstalling 70mm in my little cinema.
One item was not to find in cinema tech workshops anywhere, so I had to buy it from a not-cinema related seller on Ebay.com - the DTS CSS processor for adding subtitles from DTS discs to the screen. An absolute must in Denmark, where You can't sell tickets for a film without subtitles.
The only promise in the Ebay add was: "From a closed cinema - working the last evening..." Not the best, but as it was the only CSS in the market at the time, I took the chance, and jumped...
The jump was ok - the item found Denmark in few weeks - but the landing seems less succesfull, as we yesterday had the thing in the rack and started up for the first time, -getting to the display message: "INITIALISING" - and no further...

Any ideas on how to get on - the whole work of these many months may depend on this getting alive, as those few 70mm prints available in Dk, are all DTS. This re-install has been expensive in a way, that it must be doing a bit more than just private fun with old films... -Selling tickets now and then, would be nice...

Any advice would be highly appreciated !
Greetings
Per

[Steve Guttag]

DTS-XD10 and the essentially identical DTS-CSS suffered from the bad electrolytic capacitors going around at the time. open the unit up and look on the motherboard and see if you have some "pregnant" electrolytics with domed over tops and some actually leaking (the more critical since they can etch away the motherboard. If you do (and there is a 90%+ chance you will), change them all out with like rating/sized capacitors and you'll likely find that your unit boots up properly again. It is possible to also have a HDD failure. Some drives will suffer from "sticktion" if they sit for too long. I saw this more on drives in the '80s and '90s more than later drives though (not in DTS but in computers, in general).

[Per Hauberg]

Thanks, Steve
It is the DTS CSS, that is giving us trouble. Both XD10 performs fine, but neither of them has the text licence.
My new Tech-friend, helping with the 70mm part of the gear, has now taken the unit with him, and will go after these parts in his workshop.
I do hope, he'll find the flea. It the last thing, we miss, before running. If everything else fail, do You know, if it is still possible, át Datasat to get an update for text in the XD10 ?
Last nite, we watched a left reel of "South Pacific", -a 1964 print, very worn, and very much smelling from vinegar. It run smoothly through, and we enjoyed the sharpness and the sound, that was fine, except for one channel noise. And after that run, the old reel went to the dump. We could almost not stay in the booth for that horrible smell.
I once saw a single reel from a DTS print, which disappointed me, and now the old print confirmed, that both grain, color and sound was better then. Was this the normal for that latest reprise af South Pacific, or could it be a bad print, this guy showed me ?

Best,
Per

[Steve Guttag]

It couldn't hurt to ask them. At this point, it is too bad that they don't publicly post whatever program they used to generate the license. There is no point in worrying about the license anymore.

[Allan Barnes]

If the "DTS-XD10 and the essentially identical DTS-CSS" I have a XD10 sitting in a sound rack (in Canada) that I never use. Send me a note. You can have it cheap.

[David Ferguson]

I've mentioned some of this to Per in a private message, but I thought I'd put it here too.

I have a DTS XD10 that has the CSS license installed on it. I wanted to replace the hard drive earlier this year (as it was still using the original which was about 12 years old at that point!), but obviously wanted to keep the CSS license. I emailed Datasat about it, but never heard back so I'm not sure if they have any interest in it any more. What I ended up doing was making a img copy of the hard drive, and writing that copy onto a new drive. The CSS license still shows up, and subtitling/narration still works on it.

I'd be happy to send the hard drive img file to anyone if they want it, which you could put onto a hard drive and then put in a DTS XD10. Whether it'll work and give you CSS I'm not sure - it's possible the license is tied to this machine or something like that, but if anyone wants to try, then let me know.

[Steve Guttag]

It won't work. The license is tied to the the specific serial number of the player (I think it is tied to the MAC address of the Ethernet port on the motherboard.

One thing you could have done on an XD-10 is to make a backup to thumb drive. That should transfer the license as well...then once you were done with the new drive (I did three systems for the AFI/Silver and put in 1TB HDD using SCSI to IDE converters...which essentially made them bottomless pits for any content they would run...the licenses transferred over (plus I had the original licenses for them to reload, if need be).

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Note that the capacitor plague only affected units with the A-Open motherboard, not the later units with the PSP-800-VM motherboards.

[Elia Orselli]

At least on July 2020 datasat replied me that they are still selling CSS licensees (linked to MAC address as Steve said). I'm quite impressed that they sell them for a product which is EOS and not more serviced or repairable (at least officially).

[Steve Guttag]

Wow! I would have thought that they would have given up on the licenses.

[David Ferguson]

That's interesting - they never replied to me when I emailed them, although I'm just an enthusiast, not a cinema tech. Do they still send out the Access discs then?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

They also sent me the very latest firmware I needed to repair a fellow Film-Techer's XD-10.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Thanks, Steve
It is the DTS CSS, that is giving us trouble. Both XD10 performs fine, but neither of them has the text licence.
My new Tech-friend, helping with the 70mm part of the gear, has now taken the unit with him, and will go after these parts in his workshop.
I do hope, he'll find the flea. It the last thing, we miss, before running. If everything else fail, do You know, if it is still possible, át Datasat to get an update for text in the XD10 ?
Last nite, we watched a left reel of "South Pacific", -a 1964 print, very worn, and very much smelling from vinegar. It run smoothly through, and we enjoyed the sharpness and the sound, that was fine, except for one channel noise. And after that run, the old reel went to the dump. We could almost not stay in the booth for that horrible smell.
I once saw a single reel from a DTS print, which disappointed me, and now the old print confirmed, that both grain, color and sound was better then. Was this the normal for that latest reprise af South Pacific, or could it be a bad print, this guy showed me ?

Best,
Per

When checking for bad capacitors, I've found that the best solution is to simply replace ALL of the bigger capacitors on the affected board instead of just looking for the single bad one.

I've had multiple cases now where no single capacitor registered as genuinely bad on an ESR meter, but where the problem was most likely a series of caps gone so bad as to cause problems in series, while still being "just OK" in isolation.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I replaced all electrolytic's including this one in the center of the board.

[Marcel Birgelen]

The one with the baby-blue and black ribbon? That's an interesting looking little bugger... Sometimes you ask yourself where they source them from... It doesn't seem to have what Germans would call a "Sollbruchstelle" for venting...

It's a pity English doesn't have a cool world like "Sollbruchstelle"... "Intended breaking point" sounds so banal.