It took a while - sorry! It somehow slipped my notice (as things sometimes do!)
After each expiry event the hosting web browser is removed and the area prepared for the next item of content. The rendering method of the next item is loaded in its place, and in the case of an external web page, the URL is set. When the document has finished loading the web browser is shown.
If there is significant delay, this can be due to 2 things:
The time it takes the player to remove the old web browser and put another one in its place
The time it takes for the external webpage to load
It is hard to check which of these is the case for you, but a simple test might be to schedule a layout with 2 text items inside 1 region - short duration. Do you get the same length black gap between those (text also uses a web browser, with a local webpage).
At “Event driven actions” section please add TCP or UDP events. A very simple way to create interactions not only from external sources, but also between Xibo players on the network. Similar to “signal received on COM port” as in the OP, but not requiring serial port, rather use a network stack instead (Android players rarely contain serial ports, and even PCs lack it nowdays, especially small form factors like Intel NUC).
The player could be configured to listen on a TCP or UDP port for ASCII messages. The layouts could be configure to react to matching strings coming in on the network port. Other layouts could be configured to send TCP or UDP messages out.
Use cases:
play content in sync on multiple players (could be used for a video wall). For example designate a player as “Master” on the network, and have it send a user-defineable string like “START” to the network (broadcast it to 255.255.255.255) in a UDP package port 5000, whenever the video starts playing from the beginning (the layout has a video file playing in a loop). All the other players on the network configured to listen for UDP on port 5000, and the layout to watch for the “START” ascii string coming in. When this comes in, start playing the video from the beginning, or if reached the end just wait (the layout has a video on it, without loop, it just relies on the command from the master).
an external device generating UDP packages with ASCII strings on them. We are currently developing this low cost hardware to implement push-buttons, but can be easily achieved with Raspberry Pi or Arduino, which can very simply translate GPIO events to Ethernet packets. Used for example to change video during playback: use a layout with several video regions on top of each other, each playing in loop by itself (not jumping to next one). Skipping between videos can be done with push-buttons, each region/video would have its own dedicated button. (sounds complicated, but it’s very easy: at an exhibition the same video in a dozen of languages, and use a dozen of buttons under each screen so that the viewer can select his own language - currently we have to use BrightSign to do that, but Xibo would be so much better).
That would be amazing. I think it would be great to somehow have xibo be used as a customer display screen at a cafe, like a supermarket showing what is being sold
Hi Dan, I note that you’ve previously said Interactive Signage will be available in 1.9 (at least 6 months after 1.8). Could you provide an update to this please, as we have a client looking to be able to create and edit their own interactive touchscreen display and is looking for timescales.
we are also new at xibo, and are missing the touch interaction.
Would be nice for us, because we would like to build for our guesthouse roomtablets, wich should allow the guests to surf to special websites and make a survey at the end of their stay.
So we are very interested in the schedule (launching) of 1.9 with the interactive features.
I want to create a solution.I would like your knowledge on this subject.There will be two region in my thema design. First region will be normal Campaigns. Second region will be button. Click the button to open the first region web page. The first region will not appear in Campaigns again for 15 seconds. Is it possible to do this with Xibo?
Our implementation has been delayed in preference to other more demanded features and improvements (you will see these rolled out into v2 over the coming months - and of course v2 itself).
Our current plans are to implement interactive capabilities as described in the first post of this topic, in version 3 of Xibo. We have a road map and specification to make these changes, but they are not small and will take time.
We developed a website specifically for Digital Signage Kiosks. All the Kiosk does is run the website in a locked down browser (OpenKiosk developed my Mozilla devs based on Enterprise Firefox).
Being able to run this from within Xibo would be great, for example showing a different Layout after a set time of inactivity and obviously for all the current CMS features like sending commands remotely and logging.
Will 3.0 be released after 2.2 or will there be more versions in between?
I wanted to use the windows screensaver feature in my project.I have done all the operations in the manual. windows screensaver can preview the screen.But the screen saver does not start after 1 minute. I have microsoft windows 10.
I have successfully setup a remote dataset, relevant data is being pulled into the dataset ticker with filters, what I really need is a way for the end user to be able to modify parts of the filter from the player. This will be used for a seating allocation display, I would like the user to be able to select their initial and the list will filter accordingly to show only surnames starting with ‘B’. I can achieve this with the filters in the editor, is there a way that I’m missing to allow additional filters to be run locally on the display?
I saw the note in the latest release notes that v3 is next, how exciting! I really hope it’s going to make it easy to change what data is displayed from a dataset by touching buttons on the player.
In the meantime I have actually got my last scenario to work using the embedded widget, I’ve written some custom javascript that pulls csv data into a table, I then have some javascript buttons that modify the css to show/hide different lines of the table, and I can even scroll the table when it overflows! changes get made to the csv file remotely and changes update on the displays without any user interaction.
This is almost perfect, however I really would like to keep it entirely within xibo, rather than embedding it, as I lose the ability to use library content like fonts.
Hello Dan,
I really appreciate your work. Many thanks! I found on the github that you have already set up a library for interactively controlling an Xibo Player. Does that mean you’re already working on it? When do you think the first version will be released?
Thank you for your response.
Libor
