Our CMS system has been working great for a while now. We’re running the Windows client on Win 10 Pro Azulle Quantum Access stick PC’s. We use them in our manufacturing areas to playback work instruction videos 24/7 and they never skip a beat, overheat, or have any issues.
However, now we’re looking to take advantage of the transparency and layering features (to display additional information over the videos) in the Android client that are not available in the Windows client and are looking for recommendations.
I have installed Android-x86 on one of the Azulle sticks to test it out, and the Xibo app opens and runs. We have also tried out a MECOOL M8S Android 7.1 device, which also works.
With the Android client specifically, using still content (images, text, pdf’s, etc) works and the devices will run for days with no issues. Whenever we start to run a 24/7 video loop (entry way sign or work instructions) or using fading in/out pictures, the devices always overheat and freeze after about a day. Both of the devices are fanless and get very hot after starting to run video loops. I’ve tried encoding the videos in multiple formats to take advantage of hardware acceleration, but nothing stops them from overheating.
With this in mind, does anyone know of a Android box that has a fan inside for cooling?
For anyone else wondering or looking around, we’re going to use the Nvidia ShieldTV for all our Xibo displays. They have fans built into them that flow over the CPU heatsink and keep the device cool, even while running multiple videos with transparency/layers. They are a bit more expensive than the outdated DSDevices that are ‘recommended’, but are produced by a much more reliable company and are kept up-to-date with the most recent Android version and security fixes. They also work perfect with Xibo v2 R201.
Not with Xibo. It installs and runs perfectly. I’ve been able to playback 1080p video 24hrs a day for weeks with no problems.
However, to get it installed, you have to sign-in to the App store and download a File Browser as the ShieldTV doesn’t come with one natively. After doing that you can put the .apk on a flash drive, plug it in, use whatever File Browser app you downloaded to go to your flash drive and install it.
Also just a note, the version of Android the ShieldTV comes with isn’t full Android, it’s “Android TV”, so you can’t install full (most) Android apps or use MDM providers like Intune or Mass360 natively to remotely deploy updates/configure the device. You can flash a full version of Android to the device, but even then there are still some restrictions with what you can and can’t do with MDM.
For anyone else reading this, we ended up purchasing DSDevices DSCS9’s. I’m not sure what it is about the Xibo app but it always maximizes the CPU usage on any other Android device I’ve tried, which lead to the overheating/shutoff issues I was experiencing above.
The DSCS9 will play video and transparency 24/7 without any overheating problems. However, they do not have Google Play installed and as such are not compatible with the majority of the commercial-grade MDM solutions that utilize Android Enterprise. This is an issue for network administrators dealing with WPA2-Enterprise as certificates are not easy to keep track of if they are not automatically enrolled and managed.
Also please note that you will need to download and update the Teamviewer Host app if you are planning on using it as the version that comes with the DSCS9’s is outdated.