Preview
Improving the preview isn’t a simple proposition and there are many things that would need to be taken into consideration. Realistically we are not in a position to consider this work until 1.9 and the new player that will come with that version. The new player will have some web element to it that we hope to reuse in the preview.
The big issue with the preview isn’t actually video support - we could solve that in a number of ways - although we believe that encoding video in the CMS is probably more hassle than it is worth (ffmpeg is not secure and encoding video is non-trivial - this should probably be done in a client upload application and not Xibo).
The big issue is actually how to get all of the resources from the CMS and load them in a timely fashion - in the players these are all cached locally before playback - a smooth preview would mean a similar approach (perhaps a client application needs to be downloaded first? but in that case how do we launch it).
Publish on save
This is something we want to address - changing a layout should result in a draft which is kept only in the CMS until such time that it is released to the player.
The process would be something like: take a copy of the layout when it is opened in the designer, make changes to the copy, when publish is selected write the changes back to the original and delete the copy.
This makes things like “edit video, replace in all layouts, delete original” much more involved as there is another “publish” step to consider.
Embeddable Layouts
The idea of externally available embeddable layouts (https://github.com/xibosignage/xibo/issues/47) carries massive complexity because it means punching a hole in the CMS authentication and introduces many security concerns.
We are happy to discuss all of the above in more detail and formulate a plan