Windows Player - WPF Technology Preview

We're very excited to be releasing today a "Technology Preview" of our forthcoming Player update for Windows. This will be a rewrite of the existing Player, updated to use newer technology.

We're aiming to gather some feedback from the Community on how well the Player runs on the various types of hardware that you already run the current Windows 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 (plus the default layout) 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 are not yet in a position to release the source code for this Player, however it will be AGPLv3 licensed and uploaded to GitHub as per our other releases.

You can download this preview here: https://github.com/xibosignage/xibo-windows/releases/tag/0.0.1

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, you can try your own content with the Player (please note: not all media types are supported yet). To do this connect a current Windows Player to your CMS, delete the contents of the Player local library directory, and then set that layout as the default layout for that display. Allow the Player to download the layout completely, then stop the Player. Take a copy of the Player local library directory, and copy that on to your test library. You can then enter the Layout ID to run when you start the new Player.

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