Having jumped in blind into the world of digital signage and xibo in the last 12 months I’ve come across a whole bunch of issues with display orientation and multiple displays, as well as a few other issues and figured I’d dump that info back into the forum as it may help a few others. Overall my experience has been pretty good and I’ve got over 50 Xibo clients currently deployed and rolling out more every other week.
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Don’t use first gen Intel Compute Sticks. They seem fine for a while and then they will brick. I’ve deployed about 15 or so of them and logged more than 20 warranty replacements for them. Yes, they’re that bad. (Not sure on the newer version that has 2 USB ports but both the previous win8.1 and win10 single USB ones are trash.) I’ve since been deploying Intel NUCs, which are nearly 4x the price but are far more reliable and handle dual screens, which we have been utilising more and more.
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Setup your display settings correctly both in windows and in the CMS. I’ve been caught out connecting to a 40" samsung TV where windows 10 decided to increase font and icon size by default. This threw out the xibo config and zoomed it in too. Likewise even if your display is the usual 1920x1080 actually set those dimensions in CMS as well as the 0, 0 offset. This will save you many potential headaches.
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When using multi-screen systems the above is even more crucial. If you want Xibo player to be on the 2nd screen and you change your width offset to push it across, set the height to 0 too or it may not apply correctly.
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When changing screen config on a system Xibo may struggle to update and keep reverting back, even after forcing it to re-sync to the new xibo display config. I’ve found completely uninstalling Xibo player from the device and deleting that player from the CMS then re-adding tends to solve that one. (making sure to delete the xibo config file from %appdata% too.
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Dual display system with 1 screen landscape and 2nd screen portrait. No matter what I did with this around setting up the display resolutions and offsets in CMS Xibo would not update the display res and offset. I confirmed this by opening the config file and all was set to 0 even after I confirmed settings in CMS, completely removed and re-added the display (as above in point 4) My work around for this, while not ideal, did work. I had to manually edit the config file to set the display size and offset and then make the file read only. Come time for a content change I’ll have to remote in, turn off the read only setting, let it update, then manually edit display size and make read only again. (thankfully that display should only change once or twice a year.)
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Xibo player crashing out. (I’ve only have 1 single system with this issue. The rest are no problem) The system in question is dual screen core i5, 8gb RAM, SSD so performance isn’t the issue. It’s a POS machine so is running our POS software on the main screen with secondary screen client facing rocking the Xibo player. I have about 10 identical systems yet this one keeps crashing. It’s not the ideal solution but I’m running ProcessAlive.exe to keep re-opening it when it crashes. Pretty sure I came across that from this forum but had to dig so the short of it is as follows:
- ProcessAlive needs to run as administrator (right click, compatibility, tick the box for run as admin)
- The folder it lives in needs the logged in user to have full control or it will not save its config and you’ll need to reconfigure it every time you reboot.
- Imaging Display ID issue. This has been mentioned multiple times in the forum but make sure systems don’t share the same Display ID or you’re gonna have a bad time.
That about wraps up any issues I’ve had. I hope it helps some of you.
Overall it’s been relatively pain free so far and a massive improvement over our previous massively overpriced and poorly managed outsourced solution.