We are pleased to announce the release of our second development preview for the 4.0 version of Xibo. The codename for this version is “Westphal”.
20D/Westphal was a periodic comet with an orbital period of 61 years. It fits the classical definition of a Halley-type comet with (20 years < period < 200 years). It was originally discovered by the German astronomer J. G. Westphal on July 24, 1852.
4.0.0-alpha2 is a development preview only and should not be used in production. We recommend testing this release with a fresh installation of Xibo. v3 players should connect to this release, and we will be making v4 players available for testing shortly.
This alpha allows all users to test the v4 functionality we have included so far and provide feedback. This allows us to easily see if any areas need further thought or consideration as we move through future alpha/beta releases.
Feedback can be made in reply to this post where a member of the team will pick it up and ask for further details if required.
Alphas/betas and feedback allow all users to have a voice, and we would really encourage that if you have something (no matter how small) make yourself heard!
Download
This release requires PHP 8.1 or later. We also recommend MySQL 8.
Please use the links below to download this release:
This release builds on CMS 4.0.0-alpha released further refining the scheduling and layout editing experience.
Layout Editor: copy/paste elements
Layout Editor: resize/position groups of elements more easily
Layout Editor: add further elements for Currencies, Tickers and Stocks
Scheduling: replace the “schedule now” form with the full scheduling experience
Testing: expand out automated testing
Various bug fixes
Future development
We will focus on collecting feedback and making improvements to version 4 and aim to release a 4.0.0-beta in due course!
The beta release will have a Windows and Android player capable of displaying layouts created in v4, and the Android player will be capable of showing synchronised scheduling.
Hello Xibo team,
I just tried the version, looks good. I like the new layout designer.
But will there be also an ‘extended’ way of working with widgets like the weather widget? I used this a lot to configure individual output from the content that OpenWeather is providing.
The android sync seems to be more consistent with the alpha2 CMS. Is there any possibility of getting around the black space between videos, since the content pieces are really short, the black space is very noticeable
It doesn’t look perfect from your video, but is that due to sync or due to the screens being slightly out of alignment - I couldn’t tell?
The gap is there to allow for the time it takes to load the next layout on players which cannot/do not load their next layout in advance (all of them except Android), and on android too if for some reason they player has not been able to preload the next layout.
There may be ways we can improve this - we’re certainly keen to try!
The link I posted was an encoding of two DSCS90 (the base player option from your site), it also still does the black gap with the dscs90x.
If I do one layout then add all of the media items I need, in this case just 3 or 4, I don’t get that black flash but the sync falls off rather quick.
If I add the playlist widget to a both layouts, and set the video in the correct sequence on each layout, I get the same results as adding multiple media items to one layout. After a bit the content is completely out of sync.
The playlists are dumb to the sync functionality correct?
If there was a way to incorporate playlist in the syncing across displays then I think it would mask the issue of the black screen, and would solve my issue.
I think another reason might be because of how frequent the sync occurs between displays ( I think you said every 10 seconds). Could it be made a configurable option on the display level (by using edit from the display menu on the CMS). That might be useful to adjust for different network environments too, like if packets are being dropped on a certain network often the chances of a sink command making it through maybe greater if more frequent even though it adds to the traffic
It makes sense they would be the same - the gap is artifical.
Playlists on mirrored events are aware of sync and the followers will receive a message to start each sequence. In the alpha2 only mirrored events will sync in this way (so exactly the same layout set on both screens).
The next release will have a “Synchronisation Key” on the playlist which you can set on different layouts so that you can also sync playlists when your sync event is for multiple layouts. Playlists with the same sync key will be synchronised.
You may find that with this configured you get a gap between the playlists too - for the same reason as above - its an artificial gap to allow for loading.
It is a 10 second heartbeat, and then Schedule Start / Sequence Start events in real time (plus a small delay). We’re sync events rather than syncing state, if that makes sense (although syncing state is an interesting idea - it would need to be much more frequent though I think).
EDIT: I’ll see if I can get another private beta APK to you which includes the sync key for playlists - that would be an interesting test.
This may be a sales related question, so my apologies if it is, will the android v3 licenses be transferable to a v4 player, if they have not yet been assigned?
No worries - if you bought v3 licences recently they will have come with a free upgrade to v4 included. You can see the number of upgrades you have in My Account.
We love the sync on the latest android apk. To the eye it’s perfect. We’re just finishing installation of a 6 screen super wide video banner and we’re going to test it out in a non-lab environment.
The DSCS95 seems to handle the sync’d single zone video really well.
Are you using the beta android player in linked in the latest beta announcement - or are you using the latest v3 android player? (it should work with both, but useful to know).
