Running everything locally? Hardware-advice?

Hi, so as I found out so far the Raspberry Pi (and Linux in general, beside Android) player was ditched?
I wonder if I can run the server-side part on a Pi3 locally? All those DigitalSignage-solutions out there need a online-connection which is not possible for our project. I need something that only uses local hardware.

I really doubt the “the Pi3 is too slow”, I’m running 1080p60 on it without any problems. So, any recommendations? Oder solutions recommended to buy a IntelAtom board and a 3G-stick… I laughed and ignored that software from that time on.

Hi Phin,

You can most definitely use the RPi as a server for Xibo. It won’t be as performant as an Intel system, but you get what you pay for. If you’re looking for a complete out-of-the-box solution, there is some really good hardware quite a bit more modern than the aging RPi.

There has NEVER been an official player for RPi. We’ve never recommended it. Infact we’ve always said it’s not suitable. We even have an FAQ on it here:

You can definitely run the CMS on an RPi if you want to do your own custom installation, and build the zmq modules yourself, but it just isn’t suitable for playback as a Player. You say you can run 1080p content on it, but that’s ALL you’re doing. A Player has alot more work to do than just showing a video. It also has to handle downloads, scheduling, and compositing other media items at the same time. Add to that the horribly closed nature of the hardware and therefore poor driver support, it adds up to a really bad choice of platform.

It plays videos, photos, websites (and yes even canvas-animations) just fine. I’m sorry that you haven’t looked into the last 2 years of developement in Raspbian while making money with your commercial player-software. But your comment is wrong. The Pi3 is good enough now, especially since there is GPU-acceleration. But this time the community won’t deliver the code for this for free I bet.

I feel sorry for everybody who contributed open software to your project right now. It is sad that all those Pi-projects turn their backs and go commercial as soon they have a significant userbase. Screenly did the same thing, not adding features/bugfixes anymore since their commercial product is bringing in the money.

I pay projects that deliver what I want and need, not the ones that try to tell me why a Pi can’t do something while it is capable of doing that task with other software. Sound like a very cheap excuse for being lazy or just not caring for any more customers… just my 2 cents.

Thanks for your message.

It certainly can do all those things in isolation. Unfortunately what we require is it doing all those things at the same time, as well as embedding multiple browsers and running several heavy background processes to deal with downloading and processing content from the CMS.

I’m unclear what you mean by that. If you’re referring to the original Linux Player, I personally wrote every line. The Community didn’t do it. The libraries it was based upon didn’t have the functionality we needed and so we paid freelancers to write that code, with what little money we were making from hosting and support at the time. I wrote that code while working a full time job to support myself. I’m afraid you are mistaken if you think that you’ve been somehow done wrong by the project.

I’m not sure why you’d feel that. We’ve never closed a line of code - ever - and have no intention of doing so. We’ve never started charging for something that was free before either. We are not a “Pi” project. We’ve never suggested, supported or recommended the Pi in any way.

I’m sorry if Screenly have done that to you, but we aren’t Screenly so don’t tar us with the same brush.

I’m afraid you’re wrong there. Our aim is to deliver great software. Recommending a Pi as a suitable device instantly limits us to the most basic functionality as the hardware isn’t powerful enough to service that. Keep in mind too that for most people, the thought of getting a device with no case, having to assemble it, format and write SD cards etc is a huge barrier to entry and so consequently a huge drain on our support resource.

If you want a free Pi-based signage project, then go out there and make it happen!