I have 3 different Android devices on which we use Xibo for Android app. Today we tried HTML animations on the players. The animation works perfectly on 2 of the devices but some elements of the animation have gone haywire on minix neo x5 mini devices. When we run the same layouts on computers (via Preview Layout from CMS) or on a desktop browser, the page and animation loads perfectly.
Minix Neo X5 Mini does not support 1920x1080 resolution but instead, 1280x720 so we tried creating new pages with this resolution but we have the same issue. These new 1280x720 pages work well in other devices also. The other 2 devices also do not support 1920x1080 however, they load the pages without glitches.
We tried using 2 version of Xibo for Android - 54 and 61 and CMS version 1.7.4.
we have more than 150 minix x5 mini devices live at multiple client locations. so it won’t be possible to go and update firmware at all the locations. any other option? client requires html type of content and it is not feasible to replace all these devices with new ones
Where is your html stored? do you load from a website?
Very interested in this because I have similar problem. I had to convert to video to get a smooth animation.
We have more than 150 minix x5 mini devices live at multiple client locations. so it won’t be possible to go and update firmware at all the locations. any other option? client requires html type of content and it is not feasible to replace all these devices with new ones
I have one more question related to the HTML layouts also. Media content like images and videos are cached for offline broadcast also but we do not see the same behaviour with HTML layouts. What are the options to run scheduled HTML layouts offline?
Xibo for Android doesn’t render HTML - the Android Webview which is part of the Android OS does.
As Android improves over time, they make updates to that rendering engine, which are accessible to you via a firmware upgrade on the device.
Unfortunately if the HTML rendering engine in Android 4.2 won’t do what you need, the only way to resolve that will be to upgrade to Minix’s latest firmware which gives you Android 4.4, and a newer engine. There’s nothing we can do in the application to resolve that.
It should make no difference where the page is served from (unless the hosting is really poor). The issue is that Android is very constrained in terms of resources - especially with the earlier versions - which makes loading lots of images with fancy animation in to a web browser very likely to cause either Xibo for Android to be force closed by the OS, or for it to run with poor performance.
Performance issues over time are likely due to memory leaks within the code being run - so you’d need to ensure that memory is agressively freed in your HTML/JS code - since older versions of the V8 engine are notoriously bad at garbage collection.