Linux Player - Technology Preview 0.2.1-a

We're very excited to be releasing today a "Technology Preview" of our forthcoming Player for Linux.

We're aiming to gather some feedback from the Community on how well the Player runs on the various types of hardware that you anticipate running a Linux Player on, as well as seeing what issues might be encountered.

To that end, we've put together just the rendering engine of the Player and four sample layouts that we'd like interested parties to run on their systems, and give us some feedback about how things work. The sample layouts contain images licenced under the CC0 Creative Commons licence, and we thank the artists and photographers for their kind permission to use those images and videos.

We're targetting here users of Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit initially. The code should build on other platforms, but we've provided binaries for the above only.

Full instructions on installing the Player binary are provided in the release which you can find on Github here:

https://github.com/xibosignage/xibo-linux/releases/tag/0.2.1-a

Full source code (under AGPLv3) is provided in the same repository.

Assuming that the Player broadly operates as expected in the majority of cases, our attention will now move to the CMS interaction and we will release further early testing releases as is appropriate.

In additon to testing the packaged layouts, if you'd like to try your own content with the Player (although note not all media types are supported yet), then you can do so by connecting a Windows Player to your CMS, deleting the contents of the Player local library directory, and then setting that layout as the default layout for that display. Then allow the Player to download the layout completely, and stop the Player. Take a copy of the Player local library directory, and then copy that on to your Linux test computer. Pass the fully qualified path to the library directory you copied to the Player and it will attempt to run it.

Please leave any feedback in the comments for this blog post and we'll try to pick up any issues from there.