Documentation on examples of XMR commands

I seem to have exhausted the internet’s documentation of the use of XMR in Xibo. (scant at best)

There are dozens of pointers that show you how to reboot the players and client machine, but I cannot find any documentation of OTHER commands - like how to instruct clients to download content from the CMS or to refresh instantly without rebooting or restarting the player. As an example even though we have our players set to poll the CMS every 5 minutes, and we use Xibo to display the bookings for our classrooms/exam rooms, sometimes we have to move students quickly over to another room and have to update the room bookings on the client screens.

We use SQL statements to pull details from Datasets such exam subjects and groups writing and when they are writing into a grid layout of our exam rooms.

Currently the only way we can quickly get the display to update is to UltraVNC into the client machines (Windows 10) and reboot them. (shotgun approach)

Sometimes we have to reboot two or three times in a row before they update correctly. It would be useful to send a command to the player screens and say “check the CMS and update NOW”.

If your XMR settings are correct, the screenshot should be completed in a few seconds. If you want to wait a few minutes, the XMR is not set.

I also have this problem, I haven’t figured out the clue yet.

Please ensure that you have correctly installed and configured XMR as detailed here: XMR - Push Messaging. Docker installations have XMR pre-installed and partially configured, please see the Post Installation Setup Guide for configurations needed.

Assuming XMR is correct and working, the ‘Collect Now’ on the displays grid will make the Player collect from the CMS, and any changes made to Layouts etc will be sent to Displays immediately.

If you are still experiencing issues then please do come back to us.

Thank you

Hi Natasha,

We run Xibo 2.1.2 on Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS as a Docker Installation. The URL for the CMS is gergaxibo.sun.ac.za, and we have 4 clients connected to the CMS using the 2.1 version of the player. These clients are Windows 10 (Home) installs with their firewalls deactivated and cleaned up according to the Windows installation procedures on the Xibo website. The XMR settings are standard. tcp://gergaxibo.sun.ac.za:9505 is set under Settings…Display as well as Display Settings Profile for the Windows profile. The Collect interval is set to 1 minute, which is probably too low, but 5 minutes for use was too long because we use Xibo to display exam room and schedule bookings. 1 minute is not ideal (Xibo support says so) but the next available increment is too long.

So based on this I assume that our XMR is correct and working, but the issue that I am experiencing at the moment is that if I use “Collect” function to "force the player to get the new content. It often does not work, and the screen seems “stuck” on the old content. Only several reboots of the players (We use UltraVNC to reboot because sending “Collect Now” command or a “shutdown /r now” command via XMR does not seem to work (or there is no indication that it has or hasn’t worked.)

In desperation we uninstalled the Player on Windows 10 clients, de-authorised and deleted the displays and re-registered then and assigned them to the appropriate Display Groups, and eventually after 5 or so minutes the “correct schedule” appeared and this worked for a couple of days before FUBARing again.

My primary question was (with all things being equal - with XMR set up and configured correctly) are there examples of commands, and tutorials available of the correct and comprehensive use of XMR like restarting the player itself and NOT rebooting the entire Windows machine, Apart from one or two mentions (and a single Youtube video) of using “shutdown -r now” as a command I found nothing to work with.

I was concerned that Windows 10 was the issue (I hate that OS with a passion) and experimented with the Linux player (Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS Desktop - Basic) with snap and it seemed to work well, but after a reboot of the virtual machine (using to test) after I set the snap xibo-player to run on bootup I get a “[ZeroMQ] Unsuccessful connection to http://gergaxibo.sun.ac.za”.

So I seem to be stuck at this stage.

To test to see if XMR is working then open the Player status screen and see if the date and time of the last message is slowly advancing, which will do every 30 seconds if it is working.

Take a look at the durations on your Layout, is there something that has a very long duration perhaps?

Have you enabled the ‘Expire Modified Layouts’ option in your Display Setting Profile?

There is no command to restart the Player itself, only for the machine.

‘Collect Now’ is built in and therefore there is no setup assuming that XMR is configured and working.

I presume when you refer to the “Player status screen” you are referring to this screen: (The times of collection do see to change every so often)

The longest duration of any of my layouts is 3 minutes.

“Expire Modified Layouts” has been set to On on two of the displays to see if it makes any difference to the displays not refreshing or updating if we reboot the client machines or send a “Collect now” it seems to make no difference.

To access the Player Status screen for Windows please press i on the keyboard whilst Xibo is running:Troubleshooting

If XMR is enabled, you will be able to view “Connected” and “Last Activity”.

Example of command in Windows Client:
TASKKILL /F /IM XiboClient.exe
This command will kill Xibo process, and some seconds later Xibo Watchdog will open Xibo Player.

You can config how often the watchdog should restart or open Xibo Player.

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