Is libavg still a dead issue ?
We are currently using the linux version and we find it a lot more stable than the windows version.
Performance wise, we had major performance improvement adding accelerated=“True” while creating the XML(VideoMedia.py).
The main issue is the browser plugin for libavg I guess. It needs to be refactor with a new browser (xulrunner,chromiumembedded… ?).
Exactly that. libavg is great, but they’re a small team too and don’t have the resources to deal with badly written device drivers, so it’s restrictive in terms of which graphics chips it will run on. The major stumbling block is the browser integration. Nobody in the team has the skill set to write that and maintain it, and while we’ve had help (and indeed paid significant sums to freelancers) Chromium moves so fast it’s almost impossible to keep up. Hence the rethink on how we tackle this.
are there no alternative to chromium?
We would like to contribute to the project, but we are no expert in C++.
Yeah, we don’t want to be linking directly to Chromium either - its a main (as shown by the CEF integration in the Windows Player).
We are exploring some options in more detail and will share our plans before we get too far in (we have to get a little in to know if its worth sharing or not!)
Hello,
Any update on the cross platform player availability ?
thanks a lot
As soon as there’s something to announce we’ll make an announcement about it. Asking in here (along with the numerous other questions to the same effect in the last week or so) will only push that date further in to the future.
ok. Sorry for asking.
Hello all,
just joined the club ;-).
Just throw in my two cents.
Have you looked at QT? http://www.qt.io/developers/
it looks like a real winner, multi-platform, big support community
and its LGPL licensed.
maybe I’m too late but who knows
Yes we have looked at Qt. Thanks for the suggestion though.
A suggestion: Please have a look at the Porteus Kiosk Project when considering client alternatives. Making the Xibo client Chrome/Firefox based or perhaps even a Porteus module would make Xibo client OS setup super simple!
http://porteus-kiosk.org/
We’ve already ruled out a player running purely from a browser. They don’t offer us the resilience or backend processes we need (for example to interact with local devices on the Player). It’s an interesting link though so we’ll be sure to take it in to consideration.
Maybe this is a bit of a long shot, but maybe you could develop the client as a set of addons to kodi. Kodi would provide the base AV facilities and your skin, service and program addons would add the xibo layer on top. As you probably know, kodi runs on practically everything and would be great for signage in rooms where you need other capabilities such as TV headend on occasion.
Just a thought!
Do we have anyone who knows Kodi well enough to be able to comment on how plausible that is?
I suspect getting the libraries we’d need in the mix would be the hardest issue there - as the official Kodi images are cutdown from a standard Linux distro.
Kodi definitely worth looking at it I think, but I’m not sure that you can play two or more video simultaneously.
And does it bring an up to date webkit enabled browser component along with it?
I haven’t tried, but looks like there is a kodi-web option :
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Kodi-Chrome-Embedded
That’s great. The first big red flag for me is “a Kodi developer”. We’ve been burnt by this before. Whatever framework we use needs to have HTML5 rendering at it’s core and a 100% supported part of that architecture - not an addon that one person wrote and then at some point in the future decides they don’t want to maintain anymore (mainly because Chromium moves very quickly so it’s nearly a full time job keeping up with any kind of integration).
Thanks for pointing it out though. We’ll keep it in mind.
Hi all. Would using electron be a suitable framework, do you think?
The electron website states the following:
‘Electron enables you to create desktop applications with pure JavaScript by providing a runtime with rich native (operating system) APIs.’
At its heart electron uses the chromium browser so will have the html5 requirement down by default and also can be used to build apps for windows, Linux and Mac.
Matt
Its certainly an interesting thing to look at - I’ve looked at it before for different reasons (I was trying out the excellent Atom editor).
As a technology it seems to broadly fit.
We are also flirting with another idea at present, which we will release details of when its a little more mature
Sounds interesting. I look forward to hearing about it!