Hey look, there’s a CYX bulb…..

And it’s terrifying

The pins are about 3/8″ diameter and the whole bulb is 8 1/4 inches high overall with the light output centered 5″ above the bottom. It has an average life of 300 hours. The normal application has it inside a Mr. McLargeHuge stage fresnel safely locked away behind a big thick glass lens and a metal screen. I don’t even want to think about it too hard.

For a small $945 you can get a VisionSmith ReLamp module that lets you replace it with a 275 watt LED that pays for itself *rapidly* in reduced air conditioning and power costs…

From a fellow engineer:

Our guys were so impressed with the Selenio at our sister station that as the NetVX aged into backup status, we bought a Harmonic.

For the uninitiated— what this unit does in its most common configuration in a TV station is it takes in one or more audio/video inputs, encodes them to MPEG-2 program streams for digital television, and finally sends the output out as an ASI stream. An ASI stream is a combined feed of all of the subchannels to be sent over the air plus the metadata (PSIP), and is what is actually modulated and sent out by the transmitter. The PSIP is used as an index by your receiver and populates both the channel definitions and the program/station info that gets displayed in the program guide. That being said, it is the house of cards upon which your entire station is delicately balanced. 😉

In all seriousness, this is one of the strangest, most fragile, and most inherently unsupportable pieces of hardware I’ve ever worked with. The UI from which you have to perform most configuration tasks is based on Microsoft Silverlight, which is a dead-ass format M$ came up with to compete with Flash, which is also a dead-ass format. Double-dead-ass? I dunno. It’s pretty awful and soon I predict that’ll require us to keep some old computer around with an EoL version of Windows and Silverlight installed and no auto updates allowed because M$ will just decide to flush Silverlight away entirely.

There’s also a telnet interface into the thing for which there’s little documentation. Certain configuration tasks (which is to say most of them) require a call in to Imagine Communications support because it’s just… well, at least one person who worked on the software knows how it works, right?

The hardware design is kinda questionable and the firmware hocks up hairballs for no good reason. So far across the three of these I’ve worked with, I’ve experienced phantom frame controller failures, A/V desync, audio loss, video loss, video freeze, video macroblocking, unreported loss of ASI output with invalid picture input, reported loss of ASI output with valid inputs, and one that just plain powered off and restarted during the evening news. Oh, and you see that little display on the front? It CAN display useful status information, but…. doesn’t. Also, Imagine Communications’ idea of a “screen saver” for the little OLED screen is to display “Imagine Communications” on the top line, unmoving, forever… so when you try to view any status/fault info, you’re reading it through a permanent shadow of “Imagine Communications” that’s practically CHISELED into the matrix. Ew.