The Products Section

Here you can control whether a player is allowed to run application ad copies with administrator rights. See Application Ad Copy.

Note: When an application ad copy runs as an administrator, the player does not control the end of the process and the application can therefore run indefinitely if it does not have a mechanism to end itself.

Warning: If you do not enable this option, and you have scheduled an application ad copy to run as an administrator, it will not run at all.

Here the Ticker product can be configured to respect or ignore network control time spans with respect to fetching ticker feeds. See Ticker File Ad Copy.

Here you can enable transitions for images. The supported types of transitions are:

• Fade In/Fade Out: Fades the image in from black and fades it back to black.
• Crossfade: Fades one image out while the other one fades in. This only works if you have two images back-to-back otherwise the transition will not be applied.
• Page Turn: The corner of the image curls up in 3D and the current image is pulled off the screen revealing the image underneath. Once you select this strategy, a text box will appear which will permit you to specify an optional absolute path to a logo file that exists on the player system. This logo will appear on the underside of the page turn transition. This transition only works if you have two images back-to-back otherwise the transition will not be applied.

Note: Image transitions are dependent on OpenGL to achieve smooth animation and good performance. If you experience poor quality or high CPU usage, check the Diagnostics Report to see if your system has OpenGL installed and that it is hardware accelerated. To achieve optimum performance, always install the latest GPU driver from your video card vendor. Microsoft drivers delivered through Windows Update typically have very poor OpenGL implementations.

Note: If you want to use the transitions feature on a player running Ubuntu Linux 14.04, with an Intel video card, you will need to adjust your set-up. For more information, see Step 3: Configure Recommended Linux Settings.

Here you can configure HTML content, browser support and HTML transitions.

• HTML: These parameters control the usage of HTML content on the player. For more details about variables and how to use them, see Content Variables.
  • Allow local URLs: Allow links to local URLs (for example, C:somefile.html).
  • Allow "mailto" URLs: Allow “mailto:” hyperlinks to email addresses.
  • Append Resource ID: See "Append Address".
  • Append Location Code: See "Append Address".
  • Append Address: Optionally appending dynamic variables (Player Resource Id, Display Unit Location Code or Display Unit Address) to URLs fetched by the player’s browser. Appending these variables allows intelligent server-side logic to work out which player is requesting a resource and customize its response. Appending the player’s resource ID with the default variable name is required for use with Broadsign Publish. For example, if the URL requested is http://sample.com and the HTML product is configured to append the Resource ID and the variable name is set to “player_id”, the actual request the server receives will be http://sample.com?player_id=12345
  • Append Latitude/Longitude: You can configure Broadsign Control Player to dynamically adjust its content to the latitude and longitude of the screen.
  • Pre-Buffer content: This setting controls whether or not HTML content should be pre-buffered in advance of when it should be displayed. This is highly recommended, as some web pages take several seconds to load. However, in some cases, a web page might have Flash animations or sounds that should not start until the content is actually displayed. In this case, you can disable pre-buffer content. If you control the source of the webpage, you can also start your animations in a JavaScript function called BroadSignPlay(). If this JavaScript function exists in the page, it will be invoked by Broadsign Control Player just before the HTML page is displayed. This will give the best of both worlds: pre-buffered HTML content and animations that start only when shown. For more information, see BroadSignPlay().

  Note: The Append ... variables are automatically appended to all web redirects.

• Browser Support: Here you can specify which browser plug-in to use:

  • Windows: The default is Internet Explorer, or Edge in Windows 10 (Auto). You can also select Chromium.

    Note: If you select Chromium, users will be able to see content when Broadsign Control Player is in offline mode. Also, selecting Chromium changes the audio and video codecs available to you. See AV Player.

    Note: As of Broadsign Control v11.1, Chromium will not work on WinXP (though it will work on v11.0 and earlier). If you try to use Chromium on WinXP (Broadsign Control v11.1+), you will receive the following error message: "[2018-08-01T15:29:51](message) Frame [YourFrameID]. Could not play ad copy id [YourAdCopyID]. Could not find an appropriate codec."

    Note: As of v11.1.0, Broadsign updated the version of Chromium we use with Broadsign Control Player. If you are updating to Broadsign Control v11.1.0+ from v10.3.0-v11.0.0, and use Chromium, you will need to create a new configuration profile for v11.1.0.

  • Ubuntu: The default is Webkit (Auto). You can also select Chromium.

• Transitions: These parameters control the use of smooth transitions for HTML content displayed on the player:

  Note: HTML transition effects occur only when using Chromium browser.

  • Enable transitions: Select this option to enable choosing transitions.
  • Transition type: Choose from the following options:
    • Fade In/Fade Out: Fades the video in from black, and fades it back to black.
    • Crossfade: Fades one video out while the other one fades in.
    • Page Turn: The corner of the HTML display curls up in 3D, and the current image is pulled off the screen revealing the image underneath. Once you select this strategy, a text box will appear which will permit you to specify an optional absolute path to an HTML file that exists on the player system. This logo will appear on the underside of the page turn transition. This transition only works if you have 2 images back-to-back otherwise the transition will not be applied.
  • Transition Duration: Control the duration of the transition (in seconds).

Here you can set various options about how the TV capture product behaves.

• Enable YUV Overlay: Uses the hardware overlay to renders the video. Some TV tuners need to disable this because of driver bugs.
• Enable Deinterlace Filter: The de-interlacing filter cleans up the image to eliminate combing effects, however, it consumes a lot of CPU to do so. Stop device instead of pausing it is another setting that works around bugs in some TV Capture products.
• Pause device instead of stopping it (recommended for most devices)
• Ensure that video is rendered (recommended)
• Reinitialize rendering when the device is stopped (recommended)

Note: Broadsign does not validate or support specific TV tuner devices. The reason for this is primarily because models and drivers change far too rapidly for us to maintain an up-to-date list. Broadsign supports these TV Tuners via the MsVidCtl ActiveX. In theory this should allow support for most devices; however, in practice this is not always the case.

• Some TV tuners are not compatible with MsVidCtl and require their own custom client software to view live TV. These devices are *not* supported by Broadsign. In general, a device that advertises itself as "Windows Media Center Compatible" will be compatible with Broadsign because they both use MsVidCtl.
• Due to their nature as consumer devices, some TV Tuner devices are notoriously buggy. They may work once or twice (i.e for the home user) but overheat, crash, deadlock or leak memory when used in a demanding 24/7 environment such as digital signage where there is no user present to unplug and plug in the device.
• Vendors are continuously updating their drivers, so if you are encountering issues, make sure you are using the latest driver.
• Before deploying a TV tuner solution, the best advice is to purchase a few different devices and test them thoroughly for your desired use case. Make sure that you can return the devices that do not meet your endurance criteria.

The Video tab in the Settings group of the Configuration Profile Properties dialog allows you to configure how a player will display video content. Also, it supports 5.1 surround sound.

The Flash tab in the Settings group of the Configuration Profile Properties dialog allows you to control how Adobe Flash content is rendered on your Broadsign Control Player systems. The settings are different for Linux and Windows-based player operating systems.

• Windows Flash Runtime: Windows Flash version. In this section you can control how Flash is rendered on Windows-based players:
• Default, that is, whatever is currently installed: This is the behaviour for pre-version 8.0 Broadsign Control Players. Flash content will be rendered using the ActiveX plug-in that is already installed on the system (either manually, or by default included with windows).
• Enforce a specific version of flash: This option allows you to remotely upgrade or downgrade the installed version of the Adobe Flash runtime. If you select a specific version, Broadsign Control Players will download the installer from Broadsign’s FTP servers and install it.
• Linux Flash Runtime: Linux Flash version. In this section you can control how Flash is rendered on Linux based players:
• Default (Use Broadsign's embedded Flash 7 Player): Flash content will be rendered using the embedded Flash 7 player that ships with Broadsign Control Player.
• Use Browser Plugin, that is, whatever is currently installed: This option allows you to use the Web Plugin distributed by Adobe that is already installed locally on the machine. Please note that in order for the Player to find it, libflashplayer.so must be in /home/bsp/.mozilla/plugins or symlinked.
• Enforce a specific version of Flash: This option allows you to remotely upgrade or downgrade the installed version of the Adobe Flash runtime. If you select a specific version, Broadsign Control Players will download the installer from Broadsign’s FTP servers and install it.
• Flash Crossfade: Enable Flash Crossfade to have your Flash content crossfade into the preceding, and following, product.

Note: As of version 8 and above, the Adobe Web Plugin EULA explicitly forbids using it for digital signage purposes. To enable the “Enforce a specific version of Flash” feature, you will need to purchase an Adobe Enterprise License from Broadsign. Broadsign cannot enable this option unless these license fees have been paid to Adobe. Please contact your Sales representative for more information.

To consult the Adobe EULA, see Adobe Flash Player 10.2.