Recommendation, maybe work on getting the windows client to work better in WINE?

Ive had some success installing the windows client using WINE, the only thing that doesnt work is videos and Im not sure why. If all development has been stopped on the linux client which seems to be the case, maybe thats a road that could save on development time without abandoning the linux player side. Most of us do not want yo use windows for our player machines.

Hi aegisgfx,~

Thank you for passing this on and confirming you have been running the Xibo for Windows player on your Linux installation. I will pass this onto the developers as feedback. Could you also confirm the following details:

  • The Operating system you are using.
  • The player version you tested.

I cannot comment on the potential reasons why this would not be a suitable solution as I am not a developer but I will certainly make sure to pass this on so they can respond or consider your suggestion.

Many Thanks.

I am testing it on ubuntu 20, and I tried windows player 3 R301.1-301

Everything seems to work except video which just shows a black screen. I’m only testing this since all development seems to have stopped on the actual linux player a far as I can tell, the last update was about a year ago.

Thank you for your reply with the requested details.

Xibo are currently looking for help with the development of the Linux player, which has caused some delays. I have forwarded this post to the developers for consideration but I unfortunately do not have a solution or workaround I can offer regarding video playback.

Many Thanks.

This is only a guess, but I suspect the Wine FAQ sections 8.1 and 8.3 might have something to do with why video does not work.

On your broader point - our goal with all our players is to create a native application for the operating system. This is why we built a native windows application, a native android application, etc, rather than using some web based wrapper language such as a Chrome app. Doing so gives us greater control over the operating system things that really make digital signage shine. Running the windows player over WINE is never going to work as well as our GTK Linux Player.

I’m only testing this since all development seems to have stopped on the actual linux player a far as I can tell

I ~will try~ have tried to make it clearer on the Linux player issue page exactly what the current situation is - in summary the developer who wrote the application has moved on and we’ve struggled to replace them.


All that being said, if someone is happy to write up a guide to have the Windows Player fully working under WINE - then sure. It wouldn’t be the “supported player” we advertised, but it would definitely be a workaround for users wanting v2/v3 features in the Linux player, or users with issues running the current player builds.

@dan Have you guys every considered porting your existing .NET player to Linux? It would add .NET as a dependency, but perhaps it could ease your development woes? You could conceivably use one codebase on Windows and Linux while also adding support for MacOS if you went that route.

I don’t know enough about the internals of the product to know how deeply you’ve hooked into Windows in the existing code, but thought I’d bring it up in case it hadn’t been reviewed.

Did you already tried WineHQ - Wine Announcement - The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 7.0 ?
Curious if this will solve your issue. Maybe than i will install unix instead of windows

I haven’t looked at this in any detail, but I thought .NET core is all that is available on Linux, and that because we use WPF we’d be faced with an extensive rewrite.

It may be that switching to .NET core is worth it - having one codebase for both would be great. I think there would be a fair effort involved in that though as we use a lot of window controls provided by WPF which won’t exist in Core (I assume)

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