New to Xibo - Few Issues

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1

We are attempting to transfer our digital signage over to Xibo, but we are currently running into difficulties.

We got the Manual Xibo (1.8.1) install on our server (Windows 2012, PHP 5.6, IIS) and were able to get a player installed, and we even got layouts and such running. Quirks are that with our Server environment, our hosting company installed PHP 4, 5 and 7 (we specified 5.6 as our PHP version for our Xibo domain).

Now the problems.

  1. we have been unable, at this point, to get the ZeroMQ software to be recognized in our Xibo install. We did the manual install (Docker wasn’t an option for us because of our hosting environment).We attempted the ZeroMQ windows installer, but it didn’t seem to help us out. We got the latest ZQM packages from https://pecl.php.net/package/zmq , and tried installing the 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 dll’s using the instructions at http://zeromq.org/bindings:php. So far both methods have proven useless, and we are unable to send commands and such from our Xibo server to our client PC’s.

  2. After about 3 - 4 days of our client PC running (mixture of jpg and MP4 content) our MP4 videos start becoming distorted and not displaying correctly. This gets fixed if we restart the Xibo software on the client. are we missing a setting, or should we program our client to reboot daily to avoid this from happening (due to memory leaks or other oddities). Our clients are currently windows 7, running the latest xibo client, with kLite installed as our codec system.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

2

  1. Please have a look here (and the IIS above that) - http://xibo.org.uk/manual-tempel/en/install_environment.html#zeroMQ and then after zeroMQ is installed, you will need to configure XMR (perhaps that the step you’ve missed?) - http://xibo.org.uk/manual-tempel/en/install_xmr.html

  2. That seems rather odd, are there any logs on the player status window or in CMS ?

You can of course do that, but it shouldn’t be necessary, perhaps player’s logs would help us understand what’s actually the problem.

Unless the issue is more hardware related (GPU, memory), I assume it’s all up to date (drivers, .net etc)?

3

  1. i’ll attempt to do some more work on zeroMQ see if i can get it installed properly, but i’m thinking i might be running into issues with my hosting environment.

  2. i haven’t seen anything in the logs as of yet, the player itself keeps running perfectly fine, and will continue playing all videos in sequence even though they are messing up. I uploaded a screen capture below so you can see what the video is doing. The system is a windows 7, 4GB ram, with an intel G640 2.80GHz CPU, running a built in Intel HD Graphics card. We’ve run other digital advertising software on this PC for over a year without any video issues, so it seems kind of odd that it would start now… the CPU generally spikes to 90 - 100%ish when the videos start playing.

Has anyone seen anything like this?

4

That looks dangerous.

I assume all drivers (GPU and other) are all up to date?

If you play the same video in Windows Media Player is the same issue?

5

Yeah, all drivers and system updates are up to date, the video plays just fine in Windows Media Player, both the normal and classic, the issue seems to pop up after about 30 hours of continuous play.

We have 3 videos, 2 jpg on a main region, with a right slice showing HTML content, and a bottom region that plays html as well just fine over the same period. The player currently plays 2 layouts, a split layout and then full screen layout that plays HTML content for 30 seconds before switching back to split screen.

We are attempting some of the specific settings within the admin, but it takes 30 hours(ish) before we will know if anything works, just hoping someone has seen this before and had some suggestions.

6

In this case it could be also good to think about daily reboots perhaps?

That can be done in Xibo via commands / schedule command in 1.8 with working xmr or with shell command on a scheduled layout if xmr is not working (or in 1.7).