I’m new at my job and Xibo is one of my duties. I have to say it’s rather poorly documented, the UI is terrible and it’s incredibly difficult to troubleshoot. For example it lets you import a PDF and then won’t display it.
Today I have a layout that won’t play. It’s built, ready and scheduled. And nothing plays. For no apparent reason. Yesterday this layout was playing just fine, and I went to add another image to it, and suddenly I couldn’t edit it, and the screen was black. I had to delete it and rebuild. Now it won’t play. This layout is only supposed to play until 4PM today but I can’t even get it to do anything. And have no idea why. I’m going to start again, and add the slides one by one (all JPG and PNG files).
To say I’m frustrated with your software would be an understatement. We’re using 1.8 Android clients and a 1.8 Linux server.
Probably isnt the software solution for you then. These guys work their butt off to develop and maintain an open source signage solution that most of us find very useful. If you arnt capable of figuring it out in place of your predecessor then you should probably approach your boss and look at another software solution.
It sounds as if you have something fundamentally wrong to me.
There’s a few core concepts you need to grasp. The main one that trips up new users is that every layout must have at least one region, and all regions must have at least one item in them. If you have no regions, or a region with nothing in it, then your layout won’t be valid and so it won’t run.
The second most common issue we see is people putting very large durations on media items, and then wondering why they stay on the screen for ages! Clearly, if you tell the Player to show an image for 2 days, then it’s going to do so.
PDF playback does work, so I’m not sure why you’re having an issue there.
I’d suggest you focus on one issue. Explain clearly what you’ve done, ideally with screenshots, and then tell us what is happening - both in the CMS, and on the Player side. It’s important to include a screenshot of the Player status screen so we can see what the Player thinks the situation is. Simply saying “it doesn’t work and the documentation is poor” isn’t going to be productive on either side.
Given you’re using Xibo in a commercial setting, you might consider speaking with the project sponsor to get your CMS covered with a support contract so you have someone you can get support from when you have these kinds of issues.
I finally pulled the layout apart. Since it was 22 slides, I added them back 5 at a time until I figured it out. The problem ended up being a JPG file that would not display for reasons I don’t really understand. I looked at it on a mac and a Windows machine and it displayed correctly. I reduced its size and it still would not display properly, all I got was a black screen with the Xibo logo in the lower right corner.
When I added that one JPG file to a new layout of its own, and scheduled it, it would not display. It was a pretty straightforward file, not overly large (1MB). I can’t share that with the entire group since the file is a photo of a student here.
Ultimately the problem I have with the software is that the feedback it gives to the end user is very limited (this is clearly software written by engineers for engineers). Sometimes, I would get an X on the layout with no explanation of what that meant, and no indication of what the issue was.
If there is a region that has nothing in it, which causes the layout to be unplayable, then the system shouldn’t let you save that layout and should give you an indication of what the problem is. That’s pretty basic UI stuff.
Am I missing something? The help wasn’t much help.
I’ll give another example. I created a new layout today and tried to put in a PPTX file, and I get an error (!) that says “there are items in this layout that can only be assessed by the Display.”
That’s unhelpful in the extreme. It seems clear that PPTX files can’t be put in Layouts, but for some reason the system allows one to import them. That seems very strange to me as a newbie (but someone who has a lot of experience making print layouts).
I’m fine with exporting this to a PNG file, but the system shouldn’t let you do things that break your layout.
The system allows you to save a layout with an empty region because sometimes that’s useful - ie when you’re part way through designing a layout.
The ! is a warning, not an error. It’s there because playback of PPTX files depends entirely on your Player machine having been configured correctly to show PowerPoint files (which is documented in the manual).
Therefore, if you schedule that layout to a Player that isn’t setup, it won’t show it correctly, so the system makes you aware of that.
The system will only give you a tick there in the status if it’s absolutely sure that any Player will be able to show the layout.