General Impressions

[kmurphy]

I have spent the afternoon working with Media Signage and the Media Player, and have quite a few questions.  Here are the top five:

1. Is there a way to make the RSS reader play continuously, regardless of when the timeline wraps?  If we're scrolling headlines, and the timeline ends in the middle of a headline, it's a bit annoying to have what you're reading be interrupted.

2. Is it possible to have more than three regions on a screen?

3. Can elements such as the RSS feed be made to "stretch" to fill the region they've been placed into?  It seems like photos and videos do this now.

4. Does the player attempt to play videos while it caches them?  We had very jerky video performance the first time we played a timeline with a video in it, but after that, it seemed fine.  Perhaps if we could tell the player to cache everything before it started playing, that would fix this issue.

5. Is there a "sweet spot" for the size of a video?  We had a very difficult time getting a video to upload, but finally got one that was about 25MB to work ok.

This is certainly an intriguing product, especially at this price point.  Having given it just one day so far, I'm not ready to give up on it yet, though there certainly seem to be plenty of things still to learn.

Thanks!

-Kevin

[admin]

Hi Kevin,

1. If you have a single timeline with several channels, and in one of these channels you have ONLY an RSS component, the RSS will play continosuly and will not restart...

2. Yes, you can have unlimited number of regions / screen divisions and we also support layers and transparency for screen divisions.

3. Yes, all components will fill screen divisions

4. yes, will play while caching. Please consider your bandwidth and give large files enough time to upload / download. You may also use External link components that you can host locally.

5. I would recommend files to be around 8-10MB.  Of course we have customers using files as large as 100MB. It all depends on your setup.

Please be sure to watch these:
http://mediasignage.com/html/signage_video.html

Regards,

David - MediaSignage.com

 

[kmurphy]

Thanks, David.

1. I tried putting just an RSS component into a channel by itself, and it still stops and re-starts randomly. I checked the video that covers RSS, and didn't see anything there that I am not doing in my project.

2. I found the video that discusses the regions and how to draw them, and got additional regions added - thanks.

3. I'm still going to have to play with how things expand to fit the divisions.  From what I can tell, if you put a component or a resource directly into a division, it expands to fill it.  However, if you put a "scene" into a channel, that scene's dimensions are honored over the dimensions of the channel's assigned division.

4. I'll have to do some more digging through your tutorials on how to have remote components downloaded - that definitely sounds like a nice feature.

5. In some cases, we might not have a lot of control over the size of our video files, since they will be provided by the vendors we are promoting.  I have had mixed success with SUPER thus far, but will keep trying on Monday.

Thanks for the link to the tutorial files - I will try to go there first before posting.

-Kevin