Hi,
Is there anyway to show more network connected units in the Publish tab?
Currently running BrightAuthor 3.8.0.41
Thanks.
Networked Unit List Size.png
Date
Votes
20 comments
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Alex K. No, Local Networking is designed for small number of units.
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Best Ha What would be the recommended way to manage 10 bright sign units?
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Lyndon You can use local networking for that. You can see more units under the manage tab, just not a lot under publish. What kind of playback are you doing? You can also use simple media rss feed. Publish each player point to one feed, then update the appropriate feed when you want to make changes. Are you just doing fullscreen playback? The same could be done with html pages. We have a batch file on our downloads page that will generate an mrss feed/xml file from any files or any videos in a folder.
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Best Ha The units are networked and I'm updating the presentations and publishing them when I have new pictures/videos.
Can the media rss feed be a network share or do I need to have a webserver hosting pictures/videos?
The ImageMRSSBatch only has to be run once right? Even after there is new content in the web folder?
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Lyndon For media rss, it has a to be a web server. Do the units have internet access? If so, you could use a google drive folder to do it. You can also run very simple webserver. There's a webserver called hfs you can download. It's a fully contained app. It's a single file. You open it, specify the folders you want shared, and start it. It's a pretty simple webserver.
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Lyndon No, the image mrss batch has to be run every time so it generates a new xml file. Windows has a built in scheduler that you can use to automatically run an application. You could probably setup actions tied to new files being dropped into a folder.
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Scott Erickson I have the same concern with the number of units that you can view in the local network field. I manage around 40+ Brightsigns and it can be time consuming to scroll through all the units to find the one I need. Is there anyway to expand it in future BrightAuthor releases?
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TheCBE Also curious if you will PLEASE redesign your left panel to allow users to see more than 3 units at a time. Considering all the blank, unused space beneath that very small window, it seems possible. Please, please consider doing so. Simple update?
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JRB Technical I also would like the Networked units space to be bigger. It does not make sense that you can only see 2 players there without having to scroll, but you can clearly see at least 12 networked players on the Manage tab.
The list box should also be realizable, like most software is these days. If I have Bright Author open full size in a Portrait display (often), then there is plenty of room to have at least 20 players visible in this list box without having to scroll. And speaking of Portrait display, you should have your GUI developers revisit BrightAuthor on a portrait display. Some things use the space properly, others do not. I would be nice if everything utilized the space better in both landscape and portrait orientations.
I know several clients I work with that routinely manage up to 24 units on the same local network, who would all love to be able to see more than 2 players at a time in this list box.
Please consider redesigning this for more flexibility for users.
Thank you.
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Eric We are currently working on 2 museum projects with both handling more than 50 players,
(and worked on a lot more than this prior, and will be working on a lot more in future.
We can tell you it is a horrible (!) experience to mange this via local network publishing.
Just 2 lines of players, scroll bar issues, players not on alphabetic order… it’s a shame.
First we thought it’s just a bug / flaw. Now it seems to be stucked in the program to have it like this.
It is so inefficient and unpleasant working and it is absolute stunning it’s stil left like this for such a long time.
Although it design for ‘smal numbers, (like 2???) please listen (!) to your ‘valued’ customers!
We are working (have to work) with this on a daily basis.
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Bright Scripters Well said!
Anyone who cares about improving the BrightAuthor user experience, please click the up arrow to cast your vote.
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Jerrad Hermann This is easily the biggest frustration we have with this software.
Please, either increase the size of the window, or allow it to be resizable by the end user. It's clear that many of us find this to be unnecessarily small. -
JRB Technical So more examples on this and some noted issues for the BrightAuthor Dev Team.
I often do event work, and work in Portrait, so I usually have an extended monitor in Portrait as well to work with.
BrightAuthor's Edit Tab uses this space correctly for Interactive (non-interactive not so much), the Media Library on the left fills the available space as it should depending on Windows Shape and Size, so does the interactive workspace:
But the Publish Tab - the Networked units only shows 2 (I often have a dozen or more), and the box cannot be stretched down. Also Calendar should also fill down to the bottom. Both the Presentations List and the Networked Units List should expand to fill the available space (like the Media Library does on the Edit Tab):
And the Manage Tab, does't resize automatically. If you open it up in landscape, and drag it over to the portrait monitor, you get this:
If you close and open BrightAuthor up in the Portrait monitor full size, it will fill as it should. But resizing the BrightAuthor window has no effect on this tab, it is only resized upon first open. It should resize to fill the space anytime the BrightAuthor Window Size is changed like the Edit Tab does.
People use BrightSigns and BrightAuthor many different ways. It seems BrightAuthor was set up to use a 1024x768 screen, probably a carry over from the early days. Now many people are working in HD, 1440p, and 4K Desktops in Landscape and Portrait, multiple screens, etc. and no one seems to have really put any thought in to the fact that BrightAuthor might be used on a screen larger than 1024x768.
These are all basic UI items that should have been in place since day one. OK, so mistakes were made, I make them, we all make them. Lets please move on and try and get these things fixed in the next version for everyone.
Thank you.
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Jerrad Hermann Considering how incredibly basic and relatively simple this would be to change, it's clear that this has remained this way intentionally. I can't help but wonder if these are deliberate points of frustration to get customers for fork out money for their cloud solution instead.
There's no way the developers could have, over the years and many revisions, looked at these fundamental UI issues and thought they were a good idea to retain, or were not noteworthy to fix. -
Hwillett Would greatly appreciate this being updated. Does the cloud based network have more functionality that makes the players more visible when publishing?
It would be nice to change the order the units are displayed in the manage tab without having to delete 100 players just to add them all back in order because there is no warning prompt when removing a unit from the manage tab [or at least change the order of the menu so that the remove unit(s) option isn't directly below the view screenshots option] . Managing 100+ units most of which are updated weekly can be a daunting task with these minor yet frequent encountered nuances.
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Kyle Folger I would love for the BrightAuthor application to allow resizing of the publish network unit list. They describe local networking is recommended for up to 10 players in the documentation but they can't even support this adequately in their application.
That being said, I'm not surprised that this issue hasn't been resolved. They have still never addressed the bug where they don't distinguish the difference between save and save as... when saving a playlist. I requested this bug fix January 14, 2014. The response I got was:
"I will log a request to have the feature changed."
It's not a feature and is a bug that has yet to be fixed. It's sad that they claim to be the global market leader in digital signage media players, but they can't get the basic usability features in BrightAuthor developed. There are many other issues with the program but it's not worth mentioning them because I know they will probably never be addressed.
I can easily manage IP cameras better than I can easily manage the units themselves. Programming multiple units has always been less than desireable. Almost every IP manufacturer makes an IP configuration/management tool to manage multiple devices at once. They also don't charge for this and is free.
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Roland TL This has been annoying for a long time. I regularly have projects where I have to manage 30+ units in local networking.
I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one with this problem.
It's sad to see that BrightSign does not address it. I can't imagine that this is difficult to solve.
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pieter van rijen Still no changes in the UI (as far as I know)
Come on BrightSign, you can do better! -
Court 6 Years from the original post date and this is still an issue.
At this point, I think it's pretty clear that this is either an attempt to frustrate people in to paying for the cloud service, or absolutely unacceptable software support.
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pieter van rijen even with the latest (r5) update, this isn't changed? really??
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