Our company rents out various types of professional LED displays for live events and for one particular event we were required to provide 8 screens around the venue to show sponsors advertisements and event information. We purchased 7 x XD230 units for this purpose (two screens running off the 7th unit). The loop is around 1 hour in length and comprises of a mixture of videos and jpegs. The organizer also wanted to have a ticker tape running along the bottom of the screens to show breaking headlines.
All units were running the latest stable firmware v4.6.75 and I was using Bright Author v3.7.0.34 to compile the playlists and publishing to Class 10 Sandisk Ultra SD cards. I will begin with the most annoying and embarrassing problem.
Video playback freezing at the end of particular clips:
Despite asking advertisers to adhere to codecs and formats supported by Bright Sign they don’t always listen. Therefore I check the content using Media Info when it comes to me to see if it needs re-encoding or not. However this was not an issue for me. What was the issue was that even when advertisers gave me content in the correct format (eg. Quicktime file with H264 codec, Level 4.1 with AAC audio ≈ 15Mbps) the video would sometimes freeze on the last frame. The XD230 would continue to play the audio from the next video but would be frozen on the last frame of the previous video. This would continue until the player reached the next jpeg file in the playlist. Once it reached the jpeg file it would kick start the player back into life and the video playback would resume properly. This was embarrassing for advertisers to hear their audio but to find it playing with the wrong video.
A quick fix I found was to alter the playlist so that after every freezing video a jpeg was inserted into the playlist. This is not ideal as the client didn’t want the playlist altered but after I explained that it seemed to be the quickest and easiest fix they agreed.
Why is this happening? I will be more than happy to provide sample problem videos. Do I really need to re-encode every video before it can be played properly by the XD230? After all it is a media player and really should be flexible with playback formats.
XD230 does not support PCM audio:
I re-encoded some clips to Quicktime H264 with uncompressed 48kHz PCM audio. Despite the claims on the “No audio, but video plays correctly” troubleshooting post that the XD players can play PCM audio there was no audio when playing back these clips. I had to re-encode all these files with AAC audio in order to get them to play. Again embarrassing and time consuming!
No audio on extracted VOB file:
One client passed me a DVD Video Disc with their content on. I extracted the track to an MPG using VOB2MPG program. This is a program that provides lossless DVD extraction and will combine 2 or more VOBs if the file is split (as is the case with longer tracks greater than 1GB file size). The XD230 played the video fine but there was no audio. Again VOB files and MPEG-2 are listed as supported video files so why not support the audio as well?
Why 50 pixel limit on Ticker?
We had 2 large 37sqm screens outside the venue and 6 smaller 12sqm screens inside the venue. The smaller 12sqm screens had an overall pixel size of 512 x 288 pixels. I appreciate that a 50 pixels minimum height ticker on a 1920 x 1080 Full HD TV is a fair limitation as you would not see anything much smaller but we are not always using a Full HD TV to display our content. 50 pixels on a 6mm pixel pitch LED display only measuring 288 pixels in height is quite a large area, around 18% of the whole screen. This is a substantial portion of the whole screen area which the client didn’t want taken up by the ticker.
I tried to get around this limitation by increasing my video zone at the top a bit and making the ticker transparent. The ticker was only showing white text on a black background. I then set the safe zone area appropriately so the text started just under the video. This workaround seemed to work until the player came to jpegs in the playlist. With videos it was fine but with jpegs every time the jpegs changed the whole 50 pixel area would flash and stay black, therefore not being transparent and obscuring the bottom part of the jpeg. The client agreed that we couldn’t accept that and instead had to construct additional slides and display them in the video zone every time they wanted to update the headlines. I have since read that in the new beta firmware there seems to be a fix for a transparency problem on the ticker. Surely this should be rolled out to the stable version asap as the stable version is not very stable if it has this problem!
Please can you look at reducing this 50 pixel limit as it is not practical when using lower resolution professional LED displays.
My whole first experiences of using the BrightSign players in a live working environment has been very disappointing. I have had to work extremely hard to find workarounds and provide a quick fix for what really should be basic functionality. We purchased these units because we believed that BrightSign is a popular manufacturer of quality digital signage solutions and having been around a while would have had a chance to iron such problematic bugs out of their products.
Please let me know that there is hope to fix these issues.
Regards,
Matt
