i took a look on xibo source code (both cms and windows client) and i have noticed that the xibo modules is not pure html5, for example adding an image in cms to a region is being translated as picturebox in windows client.
so my question is there any reason why you didnt take the approach to make everything as HTML5/CSS3/Javascript and being rendered in client in webbrowser/webview component ??!!
going HTML5/CSS3/Javascript will make xibo platform independent and will be very easy to bring it to any os
a) Xibo is older than HTML5
b) HTML5 is (still) slower than native. Especially on the platform Xibo runs on (embedded devices) this is a problem. I’ve built a (partial) HTML5 player and the JS overhead is just too much for smooth playback.
c) Rendering of HTML/CSS is not uniform even within browser versions.
I built it on Ionic/Cordova framework for portability (iOS/Android etc). As I said, not finished yet and probably will never have full functionality, it’s just getting too complex.
Many many reasons. The Xibo Player doesn’t just show content, it downloads it for offline playback, makes decisions about sheduling, receives and decrypts push messages from the CMS (from 1.8 onwards).
While it might be technically possible, it would be very hard to get all of that with a pure browser solution. Xibo did many years ago work in that way and it was horribly unstable.
We have no plans to switch to a native HTML only Player engine at the moment. If you require that, there are other products on the market that have that ability.
what i mean by html was not the player, i was referring the content only.
what i mean that when i add and image or video to cms why it is not being saved as img or video html tag with css for styling and javascript for animation.
and then we have a native player for each platform that will render these tags in one html slide/layout and show on screen, apart from that the player still can do all scheduling/push messages/ commands etc…
my point is use html/css/javascript only for rending cms elements on screen.
Because video support in HTML5 is poor - there’s only a very limited subset of codecs supported and those vary from browser to browser, and because web browsers are typically really bad at leaking memory when you show large images on a repeat basis over a long period of time.
In XIBO layout we have a “FLASH” component in the timeline. That is very good. But FLASH technology is passing away. HTML5 + JAVA is current trend.
The good point of FLASH - you can put everything in one SWF file and have a smooth playback (very well supported by GPU).
(For e.g, you can “easily” put several videos in one timeline add transition effects and add Actionscript “gotoAndPlay(1)” to the last frame of your animation. Then set infinite duration in XIBO and you have perfect picture on your TV without delays between videos.
If XIBO player has no connection to its server - it simply plays the cached SWF. Again everything is perfect.
But my lovely Adobe Animate CC is moving towards HTML5/Java. And if I publish my animation as “HTML5 format” I have lots of files and folders (*.html, *.js, *.png,…). Of course I can assign all these files to the player - but this is very inconvenient.
I want to propose a new component in XIBO timeline. Let’s call it a “ZIP folder”.
This is simply ziped folder of your HTML project with index.html inside as a mandatory file.
So. XIBO player unpackes everything to some TEMP folder. Starts index.html and renders it content as it would be a current “embeded HTML” component.
You can check MD5 of ZIP as it would be any JPG, AVI or SWF file - looks very convenient.
