The Linux Player has been and still is a complex problem for us to solve. We want to provide the same native experience for images/video and web embedding as we do for our other players, as well as powerful hooks into the operating system to run commands, build reliable connections, run web servers, etc.
Due to various circumstances outside of our control, development of the current player stopped in May 2021. This will be the second player we’ve had to retire for technical reasons.
Heading into our v4 release, it is more important than ever that there is a Xibo solution for Linux. We have put together a 3 point plan to make that happen:
Improve the HTML preview in the CMS (Xibo 4.1)
Add a Layout Sharing and Embedding feature (Xibo 4.1)
Pull out reusable components from the CMS preview and Windows Players and migrate them to Linux
This is an ambitious plan for our small team, but we’re confident it will provide a long-term solution for the platform and we’re already investing to make it a reality.
I’m glad to hear that, and I’m sure the community feels the same way! Congratulations to the team for taking the initiative to make Xibo a widely adopted and multiplatform solution.
I can’t wait for a future release!
A quick update for you all. We are making good progress with a Linux player and hope to have something available to test in August 2024.
After extensive testing of various options we have chosen to develop the player using ElectronJS. The electron ecosystem will allow us to bring the same player application to Windows and Linux, as well as share code with the CMS’s own layout previewing capabilities.
Of course, the player and shared libraries will be open source.
We’re excited with how the player is coming together, and although we still have a lot of work to do, we are making good progress.
As we head into 2025, the interest in a Linux player is as strong as ever, and the team here at Xibo are still trying to make it happen. A combination of us hitting some snags in this development and others, and more bugs to fix in 4.0 than we hoped, has meant we’re delayed.
Those of you who watch us closely will have seen improvements to the CMS preview landing in Xibo 4.1, and that previewing is now provided by a new library called XLR (Xibo Layout Renderer) which can be found here:
This has always been “Phase 1” of the new Electron player development and i’m happy to say it has been successful. We have some further improvements to XLR landing in CMS 4.2, adding capability for interactive and conditional rendering differences between platforms.
Phase 2 is to build out all of the other logic a player needs to run, for example XMDS communication, schedule parsing, logging and alerting, etc, etc. We are 85% of the way through this work and expect to have something for our beta testers to try out shortly after we have finished deploying our next 4.2 CMS release.
Phase 3 is then fixing bugs, improving stability, building for Linux, building for Windows and packaging ahead of a public stable release.
If you’re happy to be a beta tester for the Linux player and you haven’t already joined the beta testers group, please apply now so you can be added in time to try the first release.