I recently upgraded our Xibo Cloud instance from 2.x to 3.3.9 and have run into some difficulties with upgrading clients.
We have a DSCS9 with Android 7.1.2, and after upgrading our CMS, it stopped showing scheduled items and would always show the default layout. I tried upgrading Xibo For Android on the unit following the instructions at Download, Upload and Install - CMS v3 and later | Xibo Digital Signage by adding the version 3 APK to our Xibo CMS’s versions and setting our Android profile to use that new version.
This seemed to work, and it started playing the scheduled layout. However, I came back the next day and found the problem returned. It was showing the default layout again instead of the scheduled layout.
I found that powering off the DSCS9 and powering it back on again would make it play the scheduled layout. This happened again the following day and again, power cycling the player made it play the scheduled layout.
Any idea what is going on here and how to resolve it?
No faults are reported in the Manage Display page, and I don’t see anything obvious in the logs. I have turned on auditing. This morning I power cycled the player to get it to work.Then at about 9:56 I checked out its current layout, made a change, and published it, and the player reverted to the default layout.
I tried to share my log file with google drive, but this forum disallows that. What is a good way to share an attachment here?
Now I received a message saying my post was flagged as spam, so I am just trying to edit it to see if it will go through…
I figured out what was going on. In Xibo 2, the only way that I found to display an image for a long time without any flicker from refresh was to set a long duration on the image widget. I had set a duration of 24 hours on my default layout for this reason. With Xibo For Android 3, the player now appears to allow that default layout to run to its full duration, effectively overriding the next scheduled layout. I changed the duration of the default layout to 10 minutes to work around it. (I haven’t yet sat and watched it for a long period to see if there is a flicker every 10 minutes now, but that is less of a problem for the default layout than our scheduled signage because the default usually only shows when we’re closed.)
I don’t see the same problem in the other direction - ie, the scheduled layout has a duration of a full day, but the player switches to the default layout when it is supposed to rather than allowing the scheduled layout to run to completion.
This leads me to suspect that this is a bug in Xibo For Android, introduced with version 3. Or is this the expected behavior? Is there another way besides a long duration on the widget to eliminate refresh flicker when showing simple layouts that contain only an image?
We’ve supported gapless playback (no flicker) since midway through v2, but certainly into v3. The recommendation now for Android is to set your durations according to how long you want things to display.
With regards to the other behaviour - it depends how you have your scheduling organised. If your default layout is part of your schedule or you have “interleave default” enabled, and it has a duration of 24 hours, then it will show for 24 hours or until it is no longer in the schedule.
We don’t know of any outstanding bugs in the way schedules are assessed.
That is really fantastic to hear. I hadn’t kept up on Xibo development so didn’t know gapless playback had been added. I reset our layouts’ durations to the default and everything is working great now.
Thank you for the help and continued improvements to Xibo!