I’m in the process of evaluating Xibo with a view to it replacing our existing digital signage estate which show bus arrival/departure information.
Currently the signs have the same layout, they have an additional piece of software which provides the current arrival information, so each one shows the relevant arrivals/departures for its location. This software outputs XML over a socket connection. I would like to be able to listen to this and format it for display on Xibo. I was hoping that this would be possible via Remote datasets, but they seem to involve a round trip back to the CMS to a publicly accessible data source which is not appropriate in this case.
Is it possible to consume and display data generated locally it could be JSON, XML or potentially an HTML page.
As you say, having a round trip for that doesn’t make much sense. Its fairly unusual (in a general sense) to have that data at the Player, so we’re geared up to consume things centrally and distribute them ourselves.
That being said, all of the Players have web browser implementations which you can access via Embedded/Package HTML widgets. You could use WebSockets to consume your XML source, format it how you want, and then display it.
Hi,
I’ve managed to get this working on a Windows based via a zipped HTML package. However these aren’t supported on a Linux box. I’m unclear how to put all the files from the zipped package into an embedded widget. It has a number of CSS files, some JSON and a number of javascript files.
Web development isn’t my forte but do I need to somehow combine them into monolithic files for each of the template categories?
As you say it might be a challange to do that for the Linux Player - embedded HTML is really the way to do it.
What you might be able to do as a workaround is enable the various extensions you need in the Generic File module, upload those to the library, and then assign them directly to your Display. You could then reference them by the mediaId in the embedded module (using [123] notation). This is definitely convoluted and really the reason we’ve made it easier with package HTML.
We will be bringing package html to Linux in due course, all the other players have it (Android might be a reasonable cost efficient alternative until we have it in Linux).
Once we have a fully stable 1.8 player (1.8 R6 and 1.8 R7 needed for that), then we’ve got Packaged HTML on the road map for v2 R200.
Very hard to commit to timelines on it, because we’re having so much trouble making the player stable. I suspect we’re looking end of the year at the earliest.