Hello all,
I’m new to the community and highly interested in finding a ultra low cost target for this platform that would allow play text animations and simple videos (less than VGA resolution) to small screens with poor resolution. (nothing fancy, really)
I see people fighting the good fight to make the client fit on a Raspberry Pi and hope that the warriors find a way. Meanwhile I wanted to know your thoughts on deploying the client player on a BeagleBone Black or Odroid C1 instead. It supposedly has more processing power and would possibly be a better fit.
Did anybody successfully deploy to the BeagleBone Black as target?
And if so, could you please share the recipe?
Welcome aboard of the low cost ship. xD
I have successfully tested the Odroid c1, and all worked perfectly. There was some issues, but I don’t know exactly if it was the player, the CMS or the hardware, but for all issues I found a workaround.
The Cubieboard will not work well, as some mini PCs that “Transform your TV on a SmartTV”.
One of those low cost PCs I was planning to buy to test, is the Banana Pi / Banana Pro.
The beaglebone I haven’t tested yet.
If you indeed buy the banana Pi / Pro or Beaglebone, It would be nice if you share here your considerations here. =)
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Thanks for the warm welcome. It may be the low cost ship but has the coolest crowd! 
Right now I’m a bit under time pressure to find a trade-off between price and timeframe.
Due to my dilemma I am looking to find a platform that will allow me a quick start and then invest my time to scale down on the hardware (i.e. cost) as time progresses.
If I can’t find some references on the BeagleBone Black I may go one step up for now (BeagleBoard) and overtime as I gain more experience with Xibo try to squeeze functionality into the BBB.
PS: I’d be really thankful if you could share your experiences with the Odroid C1 as that was another platform I was considering. Do you have a “recipe” to make it work?
The Odroid c1 will not work well with the public storage.
I’m using the Android 4.2, version 1.4 (you can find it at the hardkernel website).
To workaround with the public storage issue, I used a software to resize partitions, so I could get a bigger storage for xibo files. It was extremely easy to do, and you find the tutorial on the Hardkernel forum.
Besides this, all worked fine. =)
You will need to buy:
The wi-fi adapter (if you have no cable to use)
The SDCard (the OS will be installed on it)
The power cable
The case (if wou want)
The HDMI cable (it is the mini HDMI plug)
It will cost you around U$ 60,00. I recommend to buy all items on the hardkernel store.
The odroid will run on 5.0V 500mah, so you can use any USB connection you have. (I power them on the TV’s USB)
If for some reason it not work, it’s just to buy a common power supply of 5v 1000mah.
So… Good Luck. =)
Thanks for the great description. I’m in great debt to you! 
However there are two points a bit unclear and I’d love if you could comment on them:
You mentioned “public storage”. I am not familiar with this nomenclature and was not able to find more about it in the HardKernel forum. Could you please elaborate what you meant by it? (or even point to the tutorial)
And the second:
Did you also buy an Android installation from SpringSignage? (licencees of Xibo)
I’m running my clients just fine on Raspberry Pi (model B). There are two big drawbacks here, though:
- I’m running Raspbian Linux, which means until the Python client is updated/replaced, I’m stuck with CMS v. 1.6. Not a huge deal, but I’d like to take advantage of features in newer releases.
- Video streaming/decoding is unusable. The little ARM CPU just can’t keep up. Newer models, or the BBB (which has a faster CPU) may handle this better.
Neither of these are deal-breakers for me. We mostly do full-screen still slides, and this setup works just fine for that.
Good luck!
The public storage is the xibo player’s option. Some PCs you can use a SD card to expand the your file system, and the “public storage” makes the player be able to store his files on it.
And yes, you can buy the SD card too, I forgot to mention that.
Other item you can buy, is the RTC backup battery. It will grant you that Hour/Date will be kept after shutdown.
If not, the PC will only update the date/hour when it has internet connection, and sometimes it can be a bit lazy to do this, so your playlist will not work well because the PC data will be 01/01/1970, or something like that.
Hi sgsax,
As you could see from the discussion ilges and I were also looking at options like th RPi.
I found a ton of threads of people battling to install and make it run on that platform. I bought already a Raspberry Pi 2 and was eager to try. However, some questions remain:
Where is the client “magic” image that will make it work?
I found this one that looks promising:
Is that the one you used?
Also, people complaint all the time about performance of video.
- Do you have issues playing ANY video or would small animations or small videos with
low resolution work? - Did you have to buy some decoding license?
As you may have seen in my original thread all I’m trying to do is to play some low resolution videos on small screens (VGA or less)
Your shared experiences are highly welcome.
Hi ilges,
If “public storage” is a Xibo player’s option, then I’m still confused by your statement on partitioning the public storage.
Could you please be specific on what you did to:
To workaround with the public storage issue, I used a software to resize partitions, so I could get a bigger storage for xibo files. It was extremely easy to do, and you find the tutorial on the Hardkernel forum.
Did you Set a special partition to the SD card? Whom did you assign that partition to? What exactly did you have to do?
Sorry about the extra questions, but this seems to be THE big issue between a succesful implementation with the Odroid C1 and failure. 
I’m using Raspbian Linux (build of Debian for ARM on the RPi) in conjunction with a custom version of berkelium and libavg libraries which I found from this thread on the Raspberry Pi forums. I also had to get and old Python client, thanks to this response to my question on this forum.
So far, we have yet to find a video that will play back at all. The Model B only has a 700MHz ARM6. Newer models and competitors have better/faster CPUs, so they may handle video better, but I haven’t had a chance to test yet.
I have never purchased a license for any CODECs, on any platform. But I’m also a Linux fanboi, so I’ve never had to go looking for one.
I have seen articles about people who are using the RPi for video playback, so maybe I just haven’t found the right combination of encoding settings to make it work properly.
I only have experience with my RPi B. Luckily, this class of SoC machines is relatively inexpensive, so it shouldn’t be too painful to try a few different ones to see what works best for you. BBB definitely has better specs than the RPi B, but so does the RPi 2.
Hope this info is helpful to you.
We didn’t have the opportunity to prove it, but it might be that the Android Player config option to “always store HTML on internal storage” might have solved igles’s problem with secondary storage.
I believe he resizes the system partition (making it bigger) so that he could store all files on “internal storage” without worrying about the original problem with secondary storage - a reasonable solution to be sure!
@dan The “always store html on internal storage” did not solved that problem. =/
@vnet The thing with the partition is the follow:
The OS creates 4 partitions on the SD Card:
2 of them is for obscure OS files that I didn’t go further.
1 (about 2gb) is for the system and apps.
1 (about 10gb) is for storage (this one the Xibo app recognizes as a “public storage”).
The xibo, as a app, run on the system partition, which has only 2gb.
What I did was to increase the size of the system partition (about 10gb), and leave only 2 to the storage.
This can be done with free softwares, and take only a few minutes.
I run Full HD videos on my clients, work perfectly. To not say it is 100% perfect, HTML/CSS animations freezes a bit, but not big deal, and there is a 1/2 seconds of black screen between videos, which is normal, even in some windows players…
I can make a video showing the content, to see if this 2 little issues will bother you. =)
I changed my player resolution from 1080p to 480p. The html animations (tickers fade,etc) works very well. I don’t know what resolution your players Will be. If you know, tell me and I can test it in my device. =]
Hi sgsax,
I’m excited about the prospects of running Xibo Client on the RPi2.
I also looked into the same thread you mentioned and got completely lost in the massive discussion with many people claiming to work and a few posts later dismissing it saying that there were some issues.
I also noticed too many people seeking some way to get their systems working. Thus, I think that would be to the benefit of the community if we had a well documented way to install Xibo Client on a RPI2. Do you think you could either point out to or write down a recipe to what you did to successfully make this work?