RV Legacy License Management

Note:

Licensing RV through a GTO stand-alone or floating license file is still currently supported, but not distributed anymore. Please visit our FAQ about the maintenance of pepertual licenses for more information.

This documentation is intended for RV standalone licensing only—node-locked or floating—and is considered legacy functionality. RV standalone licensing is no longer offered. This documentation is only for customers with existing standalone licenses. Click here for a list of our current offerings. Here is a list of answers to common questions around Legacy licensing:

The RV (and RV-SDI) version 6.0 executables support both licensing systems (standard Tweak licensing and licensing via Flow Production Tracking).
There is no requirement that a given site uses only one type of licensing.
Functionality with RV licensed via Flow Production Tracking remains the same as how it functioned previously.
A user can switch from Tweak-standard licensing to Flow Production Tracking licensing and back (the choice is stored as a preference).
When a user connects to Flow Production Tracking, their license remains “legacy” if RV was unlocked using a legacy license. However, if the legacy license becomes unavailable at some point and if RV is able to unlock itself using a Flow Production Tracking authentication, then it falls back on the Flow Production Tracking license from that point on.
At a facility where standard Tweak RV licensing is established, no changes are introduced when a user runs RV6—they will be able to test Flow Production Tracking licensing by selecting a menu item if they wish.
Licensing RV via Flow Production Tracking does not produce any requirement to use Flow Production Tracking for other purposes. For example, users may license RV via Flow Production Tracking, but decide not use Screening Room.
Using RVIO to export from RV is allowed as long as RV is licensed (with any licensing scheme). Usage of RVIO "on the farm" (or otherwise unassociated with any local RV process) still requires a standard Tweak license.

If not licensing via Flow Production Tracking, RV requires an accessible license file (called license.gto) in order to run. The license file either directly provides a license or indicates one or more servers from which to obtain one. Each platform has a different set of places in which RV tries to find a license file. If it is unable to find it, it will complain and exit immediately.

Once RV is licensed with Flow Production Tracking, it stops looking for a legacy license. You can "reattach" RV to the legacy license by using one of the following methods:

Specify the license via the -lic RV command line argument.
Specify the license by setting the RV_LICENSE_FILE env var to the full path of the license.
Specify the license by setting the TWEAK_LICENSE_FILE env var to the full path of the license.
Reset the RV prefs via the -resetPrefs RV command line argument.
Use the License Manager from an earlier version of RV to set the license.

Specifying License File Location

Each platform has a set of default license file locations, as described below, but these can be overriden either from the command line with the "-lic" command-line flag, or by setting an environment variable: either a per-application location (for example RV_LICENSE_FILE ), or TWEAK_LICENSE_FILE which will apply to all Tweak applications (note that a license file can contain any number/kind of licenses, or in fact a pointer to a license server which can serve any number/kind of licenses).

The argument to the "-lic" command line flag (or the contents of the environment variable) must be the complete path to the license file, which can have any name (as long as the extension is ".gto").

macOS

On macOS, RV looks in four separate places to find the license file:

In your home directory at ~/Library/Application Support/RV/license.gto
In the system directory at /Library/Application Support/RV/license.gto
On the Network at /Network/Library/Application Support/RV/license.gto
Inside the Application at RV.app/Contents/Resources/license.gto (for example /Applications/RV.app/Contents/Resources/license.gto)

RV will look for the file in the order above. The first license it requires is the one which it will use.

When RV starts without a license, it will open the License Installer application. This application will merge licenses and/or add a server license if needed. The installer always adds the server license last so that machine locked licenses are used first. When you save the license file it is saved in two places:

Inside the application at RV.app/Contents/Resouces/license.gto
In the system directory at /Library/Application Support/RV/license.gto

The installer may require authentication.

Linux

On Linux, RV looks for the license file in three locations:

In your home directory at ~/.rv/license.gto.
In the current directory.
Inside the RV package directory at etc/license.gto (for example /usr/local/rv-install/etc/license.gto).

RV will look for the file in the order above. The first license it requires is the one which it will use.

Windows

On Windows, RV looks for the license file these two locations:

In your home directory at $HOME/AppData/Roaming/RV/license.gto.
Inside the RV package directory at etc/license.gto (for example C:/Program Files (x86)/Tweak/RV-3.12.20-32/etc/license.gto).

RV will look for the file in the order above. The first license it requires is the one which it will use.

License File Format

The license file is a text GTO file which contains any number of machine locked licenses and/or locations of servers to contact to find a license. RV will ignore licenses which do not apply to the machine it is running on, so its OK to have many machine locked licenses in a single file. A typical license file will look something like this:

 GTOa (3)

c498a8f831da62168d21065af1bedbac0038273a: license (1)
{
    license
    {
        string package = "rv"
        string version = "any"
        string expires = "permanent"
        int count = 1
        string hostID = "00:0A:95:AE:F9:E0"
        string issued = "12-Jul-2006"
        int duration = 0
        string reason = "web"
        string licensee = "Jack Foo Bar"
        string email = "jackfoobar@myemail.com"
        string machine = "brutus"
        string os = "any"
    }
}

In this case, there is a single machine locked license. The first line of the file identifies the file type and is not part of the license. Some of the information is for the licensee’s use only (machine name, etc). Multiple licenses in one file would have the form:

 GTOa (3)


c498a8f831da62168d21065af1bedbac0038273a: license (1)
{
    license
    {
        ... etc ...
    }
}

q431a8f831da62168d21065af1bedbac0038c421: license (1)
{
    license
    {
        ... etc ...
    }
}
... etc ...

Here each block starting with the long hash is the start of a license for an individual machine. If the file is indicating to the client that it should look up a server, it would look like this:

 GTOa (3)

server: floatinglicense (1)
{
    id
    {
        string hostname = "licenseserver.ourdomain.local"
        int port = 5445
    }
}

In this case licenserver.outdomain.local would be the name of the machine running the license server that RV should contact to obtain a license. A GTO file can contain any combination of machine locked licenses and server floating licenses.

The first license in the file that works is the one used. If you wish to have both machine locked and floating licenses in one file, the best behavior is usually obtained by putting the machine locked licenses before the server. This way the dedicated licenses are used up before the floating licenses.