New post
0

Possible send out BrightSign playback info to a iPad web as graphic info?

Avatar
Jimmy
None
Follow

Hello dear BrightSign community:
I am assisting a gallery theater to playback lots different videos in schedule by BrightSign, and outside of theater need a display such a iPad or touch screen that show retime info about what is playing now?

Those info including :

1: Current playing time, how much time left?

2: Current playing Name of video, who is the director and extra info etc!

3: middle take break time count down!

Hope this feature could be developed !

If anyone can guide me a direction to read more what is related content!

 

Best and thanks in advance!
Jimmy

 

 

Date Votes

1 comment

  • 0
    Avatar
    Ken C

    Jimmy,

    Yes, this is all possible. I developed a similar, but slightly simpler, "dynamic label" system for a temporary exhibition's small screening room at our gallery.

    A quick description of my setup: A BrightSign XT244 played a shorts program of a dozen films in a loop. The display device was a 75" 4K monitor + externally amplified loudspeakers. A 12.9" iPad Pro was installed at the screening room entrance, and displayed a full screen label (title, length, description, artist bio, etc.) of the currently playing film. The iPad label updated when the next film began playing.

    The BrightSign player had a WiFi/Bluetooth module installed, configured as a WiFi Access Point. The iPad was configured to connect directly to the BrightSign's AP. The AP was setup to use WPA2, so that the general public couldn't easily connect to it. SSID broadcast was also disabled. This worked reliably for the several month duration of the exhibition. If you have a long distance between the BrightSign and iPad, or walls are causing problems, connect the BrightSign to a 3rd party AP using an ethernet cable, and locate the AP close to the iPad.

    The iPad ran Kiosk Pro Plus (which is basically a highly configurable wrapper around the iOS WKWebView web rendering engine) in Guided Access Mode, and loaded the labels from the web server running on the BrightSign, over the WiFi connection. The labels consisted of a mix of HTML, CSS, Javascript and PDF. The index.html page had a Javascript timer that would poll the BrightSign (see below) every couple seconds using an AJAX GET request, parse the returned JSON, and then display the correct label and information.

    I developed the BrightSign's application using BrightScript. It might be possible to do this using BrightAuthor, but I'm a programmer by nature, and after years of writing progressively more complex BrightScript applications, I much prefer the flexibility and rapid development and testing it affords.

    To achieve the synchronization between the videos and the labels, I created a simple REST server using BrightScript's roHTTPServer object and associated AddGetFrom... methods (more info here: https://docs.brightsign.biz/display/DOC/roHttpServer). So a GET request to a particular path (ie. /CurrentVideo) would check the roVideoPlayer object (https://docs.brightsign.biz/display/DOC/roVideoPlayer) and return a JSON array with the current video information such as an playback time, filename, index, etc. As mentioned above, the Javascript running in the HTML page on the iPad would use this info to determine which label to show.

    I realize this is all quite involved, but I was able to get everything working in under a week. If you can work with a full stack web developer, they should be familiar with all the necessary languages and protocols, and be able to figure out BrightScript fairly quick.

    For your application, you'd also need to write a scheduler (a compact 7-day / 24-hour multi event playback scheduler can be written in BrightScript using the roTimer object) and a way to read and parse a playlist with start times (I used BrightScript's ReadAsciiFile and XML parsing methods in this project for ordering and per-video volume settings, just without the start times).

    Ken

Please sign in to leave a comment.