Android-Upgrade from 1.6 to 1.8 caused trouble

#1

After I send the new apk to all of our Players in Japan everything went fine for a while.

But after an Earthquake in Osaka, the power was down and after it was restored, every player showed the Message “Choose your standard app-drawer”.
Without beein online and showing any content anymore…

Our Players are behind a glass display and can only be removed with a glass remover.
Because they have no Touch-screen you also have to use a cable mouse to make settings…

That was hard to explain to our japanese customers and I had to go to specific locations by myself, which costed us money AND time.

In the future:

Please let us know if such things happen, before we upgrade.
Like: “If you do this upgrade, be warned that some changes have to be made at the designated players manually!”

Also some players upgraded already had not the new settings menu…
After I restarted them twice the menue was finally changed?!?

Regards, Gerome Meyer

#2

Thank you for your message.

That is noted in the release notes for Android already:

Please note we have had reports that some devices will show a “Launcher decision” popup on reboot. If you haven’t done so already, please make sure you reboot after upgrading your device to make this selection.

Unfortunately there’s no way for us to prevent that popup happening, but we did alert you to that as soon as it was known that it may happen.

#3

Thanks for your fast response!

Today we had another issue, with R108…
We changed the Layout from 2 Videos to only 1 last week.
Yesterday we changed it back to normal and our customer wrotes us an email that the displays are mostly black.
Today we went there and it was the case that 4, of 6, displays there had the xibo splashscreen.

I checked the status and there were no errors and the connection was fine.
The settings menu was still old (not scrollable with less options) , even if the software told me it is R108 already…?
I restarted the device and the video was running again.
Also the settings menu was new with more options.

What is the cause of that, was there an internal update inside the R108?

That was only one of 12 locations in whole Japan…
We are afraid that this could happen to other displays also…

The xibo website showed no error on these devices and I only get black screenshots in my list…
Is it because we have playing a video? At this rate, this feature is not really useable…
Would it be possible to get also screenshots from the shown videos in the future?

I can provide you pictures and logs I tooked today by mail if you want.

urimatjapan@gmail.com

Regards, Gerome Meyer

#4

If you see lots of options on the menu, then that means that the Player is not connecting to the CMS correctly.

If you only see a few, that means the settings are coming from the CMS as they should.

What devices are you running R108 on? 1.8 requires minimum Android 4.4 to work, so if it’s something older that may well explain your issues.

#5

Here is the information what URIMAT has provided:

OS: Android 4.4.4
Detail Specification
Hardware
CPU
Cortex‐A9, Quad Core, up to 1.6GHz
GPU
Mali‐400
System Memory
1GB DDR3 SDRAM
Internal Storage Memory
4GB NAND Flash
External Storage Memory
Micro SD Card (Micro SDHC Class10 compatible)
LCD
6.5” 800 X 480 digital TFT LCD、
Touch Panel Type
No touch panel
Clock Battery (for RTC)
Lithium‐ion non‐chargeable coin battery
Wireless Communication Specification
Wi‐Fi：IEEE 802.11b/g/n (external USB dongle)
External Interface
SD card slot
USB interface:
USB host type A port （USB 2.0 high speed 480Mbps）x 3 (front x 2, back x 1) (lower front
port is shared with back port)
Power switch
AC adapter

#6

Maybe I checked the menu to fast after switching it on, so there was no connection established…

I checked my photos and there was a interesting log:

Blacklist
(50.wmv) Unsupported Video. What=1
Extra=-2147483648.

But it was the exact Video we used in the same layout until last week…
Also the video in the xibo libary has an different name…?

And why does it not play the one video, which was working before and showed only the splash screen of xibo?
Restarting is not changing the files

#7

The message means that when we told the Android Media Server to play the video, it told us it couldn’t decode it.

WMV videos aren’t well supported on Android. Our experience is they work sometimes and not others. You are best sticking to native Android formats - MP4 H264 and WEBM.

Xibo won’t continually try and play a video that we’ve been told isn’t compatible. It will blacklist it and that will make the layout invalid, which is why you get the splash screen. You can make the Player try over and over again by changing the setting in the display settings profile which controls blacklisting of videos.

The intended use is that you put your content in the schedule, and have a simple layout set as default which will show when nothing else is configured, or you have an error condition. If you put your content on the default layout as you are doing, then there’s nothing left for the Player to show in that scenario.

#8

Thanks for that answer!

But the other Video was an .AVI file, which should be no problem, and it was not blacklisted.
So none of 2 videos was played because one was faulty?..

#9

If they’re both on the same layout then yes. If one element of a layout isn’t valid then the whole layout will not be shown as the Player can’t show the whole layout. They are a single block and treated as such.

#10

Sorry for the late reply!

So you mean it is better to make 2 seperate Layouts in the future?
1 for our Video and the other for the customer.
Then, if there is any trouble, at least our video is still shown and no blank screen.

How to arrange them played continuously and in a loop (1-2-1-2-1…)?

And still the question of black screenshots (when videos are played) is unanswered…

Thanks in advance and for your hard work!

Gerome

#11

Yes that would be sensible.

Your ideal setup should be:

  1. Default layout - simple layout lasting around 10 seconds, with just an image on it (eg company logo). This is shown when nothing else is scheduled, or in an error condition.
  2. Customer video layout
  3. Your video layout

The two video layouts could either be in a campaign together, and scheduled “Always”, or you can simply schedule both layouts for the same times (eg 8am today - 8am 1st November 2019) and the Player will show them both in a loop. You should not attempt to schedule each individual play of the video.

Screenshots on Android do come back black where you’re using hardware accellerated video. We’re not able to capture the video content as it is directly rendered on to the graphics hardware. All other content is screenshotted correctly.

The only exception to this is where we have integration with the device directly to get a hardware level screenshot, in which case a true screenshot is returned. We only support that currently for some specific hardware, but we’re looking to get that implemented where we have a relationship with the device manufacturer as well (it requires the device to perform the actual screenshot).