Best Hardware Setup for Xibo CMS and Players

Community Discussion
1

Hi Xibo Community,

I’m setting up Xibo for a digital signage project and need help choosing the right hardware for both the CMS and Player.

For the CMS, I’m considering using an i7 processor laptop. Would this work well, or should I look at other options?

For the Players, I’m torn between:

  • Android Media Players (Android 9.0+, 2GB RAM)
  • Windows Mini PCs (Intel i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD)
  • SoC Displays (webOS or Tizen-compatible)

Our content will include HD videos, web widgets, and real-time data. Which option works best for smooth playback and easy updates?

Lastly, we plan to scale this setup across multiple locations. Any tips on hardware that’s easy to manage remotely or integrates well with cloud-based solutions?

Thanks for any advice!

2

Hello,

for CMS, it is enough to use i5 gen 7 laptop in my case.
I installed ubuntu and self hosted CMS.
For players, I used 3 android players(brandname :ugoos x4q). I did lots of trial and error for choosing appropriate android player. It is very tough process.
If I have enough money for windows pc, I will add windows pc for player.
There is important advantages for window pc player. I can remote access player easly compared to android player.
Regards.

3

Plus you can access Android Player easily using a self-hosted Rustdesk Server. Better than using anydesk or Teamview @ironlyj

4

SOC I would only use if there was a cost/space constraint, and for only basic content strategies.

Windows player (currently) doesn’t support seamless play black so there is a black frame shown between media changes , I believe due to the windows media player engine. Enabling double buffering helps, the better the machine, the less this black gap shows up, so mini windows PCs will just amplify the problem. Windows player also requires updating outside of the xibo ecosystem, scripted or other.

Android players work much better running xibo from a content playback, and it can’t get much easier to deploy if you buy xibos DS Device, literally plug and play.

The ChromeOS player is neat, but you need to use Google’s (paid) enterprise kiosk device license in addition licensing xibo.

We run our CMS’ using dedicated VMs each with 4 to 16 vCPU with 8 to 64 GB memory and MySQL on an nvme 100GBE iSCSI RAID (Software based initiators).

A properly setup DB server makes a world of difference when you deal with high traffic.

Being on docker, you could in theory run xibo on any x86_64 machine.