Xibo for Windows WPF Player Pre-release

Xibo are pleased to announce a pre-release of Xibo for Windows v2 R252. This release works with Xibo CMS version 2 and has legacy mode for version 1.8. It requires Windows 10.

This Player is a pre-release for testing and should not be used in production environments.

Download Xibo for Windows v2 R252

The Xibo Project's first Player was a Windows Player written in C# and WinForms back in 2004, and although we've added lots of features since then, the underlying technology is the same. This has served us well and provides for a very stable player, but does come with some limitations. There will be some debate as to which limitations are the most important, depending on your use case, but the big 3 are:

• Internet Explorer 11 for web rendering
• No transparency or overlapping Regions
• No transitions

We've been looking for ways to mitigate these issues for years - long term users will recal that 1.8 even came with the option to enable an experimental Chrome web browser! However we've always hit issues with stability or with what is possible in Win Forms.

WPF

WPF stands for windows presentation foundation and is a more graphically orientated framework than Win Forms. WPF is not new and we've tried to move to it in the past, with limited success. However, we think that this time we've done it and that we have a stable and reliable WPF player for our users to try.

In this pre-release we've solved 2 of the 3 main pain points, by including a Chromium web engine and transparency for overlapping Regions. We're also hard at work on adding transitions, which are possible with WPF as our underlying technology.

Download the MSI using the link above and we look forward to getting your feedback on this new addition to the Xibo platform!

EDIT 29th Feb - This release has been updated with the following fixes:

• scaling for layouts of different resolutions to the player
• widgets with background colours
• screensaver mode throwing an exception
• widget transitions (fade in/out, and fly)