Contacts: Jim and Jennifer Kollar

A Brief History of NightThunder

NightThunder had it’s beginning in January, 1997. At that time I was contemplating taking my fireworks hobby to the next level. I have always been fascinated with fireworks and I was now getting into it in a big way. I had built my first electrical firing system back in 1992, but now was the time to professionalize the hardware and software. With my wife’s support, I built a ruggedized firing system capable of firing 2048 pyrotechnic devices from a single controller. Of course, the controller is computer controlled and with the addition of the software I wrote, I am able to choreograph a fireworks show to music, video, and lighting. My wife and I have used this system many times with great success.

I am a licensed pryotechnics operator in the State of Washington and received my license in 1999. I was attracted to the name NightThunder due to it’s simplicity and that it captures the essence of what my wife and I were doing at the time.

My most recent show was for the city of Steillacoom which is just south of Tacoma and was fired on July 4th, 2005. We fired from a barge that was about 1000ft offshore. Our largest shells were 16 inches in diameter and weighed ~50 lbs. There were over 1000 pyrotechnic devices on board. Next year we hope to have an FM transmitter broadcasting music synchronized to the fireworks display. One of the ReplayNT Beta testers who helped me get the DVIco card working was invited to come out and work on the show and see it from the barge. Here is a picture he took of me holding a 16” shell (Thanks Karl!).

Since the successful implementation of my firing system, I wanted another hobby. I had bought a ReplayTV 3060 for an outrageous price (didn’t seem so at the time) when lo and behold the ReplayTV 4000 line came out, the first networked DVR. I had to have one!!! DVarchive was in it’s infancy, ReplayPC source code was available, several others were writing download programs and other utilities based on ReplayPC, and I started tinkering.

Using my great imagination, I came up with the name Replay(N)ight(T)thunder for the name of my application. Pretty clever, huh? I decided that I had a good little download program and wanted to add to the ReplayTV community by providing yet another download program. One of my goals was to create a self contained program that required no third party programs (or at least complicated setup instructions) like many of the other programs. When I was ready I released the software. Rather than setting up a new web site, I decided to stick with NightThunder.

Over the next couple of years, I kept the software up to date by adding support for the ReplayTV 5000 series, adding a few features, and repairing bugs. However, my interest was waning in that the ReplayTV platform, which much to my disappointment, seemed to be going no where. Furthermore, I was deeply disappointed that the promised interface between the ReplayTV 4000 line and 5000 line never materialized. I vowed never to write software that would favor one device over the other so I purposefully never tinkered with any of the new ReplayTV 5000 features and my development of ReplayNT came to and end. Or so I thought...

Back in 1999 I bought my first HDTV (I have a wonderful wife, she had no idea why I NEEDED one but she let me purchase it anyway). At that time there was no HD programming available in my area over cable so I was stuck with OTA recpetion using a Toshiba DCT3100. Several years later, HD was starting to be offered on cable by Comcast. In addition, Comcast turned on the firewire port on their DCT5100 allowing for recording to PC’s and DVHS decks. Of course, now I had to have DVHS deck (got a JVC 30000). The HD movies on the premium channels where awesome and I wanted more. Unfortunately, the JVC30000 could not record HD content based on internal timers (but you could do so for analog, what were they thinking?) so if I wanted to record a movie broadcast at some late night hour, I would have to wake up to start the recording (using a Radio Shack timer/remote was just to low tech for me).

So I decided to re-awaken ReplayNT. I found out about the guide service being offered by Tribune Media Service. After a little experimentation I knew I could get guide data. I then went looking for an IR emitter/learner since I wanted to have control of both the DCT5100 and the JVC30000. After a brief search, I found one from SmartHomes. I was all set!

In the summer of 2004 I released ReplayNT 3.0 that had all of the ReplayTV functionality from previous releases plus guide data and an interface to the SmartHome emitter/learner. Although I had some success with the software, the SmartHome software and hardware really is awful for third party developers. It is unstable (would hang, require resets) and is very poorly documented.

Fortunately, one of the people trying my software was using another IR emitter/learner (the one I currently support). I decided to give that a try and have found it to be rock solid, never having had a problem with it. By this time it was early August and other developments were occurring. Comcast was pre-announcing their HD DVR which would marginalize a program that could only record firewire output to a DVHS deck. Time to rethink.

In early September, work was begun on ReplayNT 3.5. The vision was to preserve and where possible enhance the ReplayTV functionality while rethinking the whole purpose of ReplayNT. One of the things I noticed is that I was acquiring many different tuning, recording and playback devices that would not talk with each other, each with their own guide data. In addition, I sometimes found I would like to tune one device and record the output of that device on another device.

The addition of Guide data to ReplayNT opened up a whole new frontier for development. What if, from a single program, you could set up recordings on any of your devices or even pair dissimilar devices? ReplayNT 3.5 was the first release of this idea. It was a great improvement over past releases and is now the foundation for all future releases of the ReplayNT 3.x series.

Hint: I’m contemplating a 4.x series that will expand the software in yet another direction. The title of this site says it all (ok, just most of it).

ReplayNT 3.6 expands on this idea by primarily adding some “maturity” to the program. PC capture card support is greatly enhanced. Mouse control was added making it possible to control PC capture cards that did not have keyboard shortcuts for important functionality. Also, I acquired a DVico Fusion HD PC capture card and I found out I was not able to reliably tune QAM channels since there was no direct way to get to sub-channels with just keystrokes and mouse clicks. Registry tuning was added and works quite well. Finally, I’ve added the ability to re-map stations on different devices using the same lineup. This adds a tremendous amount of flexibility. Although this is now a very functional program, there is still more to do.

So where is NightThunder going from here?

There will be some dot (i.e. 3.6.x) releases to fix bugs and add some other limited functionality. HTPC support will be a dot release.

Version 3.7 will be a rollup of the “dot” releases along with these possible features:

• Season pass recordings.
• Email support for both information purposes and to tell ReplayNT what programs to record
• Sticky searches. Create a search criteria and when a match is found, you can be informed either by a report or email.
• Ability to control PC capture cards on other computers on your lan from a central computer.
• User suggestions.