I am looking to do an interactive playlist in Bright author that will play a certain item only during a given day or time period such as a lunch special only playing during lunch. In other systems that I have used you could set a valid date time for an item but the best I could find in BrightSign is the Time/Clock Event. while a little more difficult for the most part I go this to function like I want except that minimum interval from the previous item is 1 minute. Am I mussing something in the software or is there a way to put in a request to be able to set the intervals to seconds?
Date
Votes
6 comments
-
Lance Lander You can schedule multiple presentations when you publish. It's best if the resolutions are the same otherwise the unit will have to reboot. When scheduling your presentations you can click on a day in the calendar and adjust the "Event Time" down to the exact minute you want it to play.
-
Gary Dreyer I thought about doing it that way but I did not want to have to manage a separate presentations which becomes a pain since most of the content should play all day. This would mean updating the same content in multiple presentations when a change occurs. I hope that BrightSign would would look at this as a feature enhancement for future versions.
-
Brandon I'm not following why you need to time to be in seconds, are you thinking you will set a Time/Clock event for each item? That would be quite tedious.
What you can do is set up a parallel "sub playlist" that enters at the special time and exits at the end of that time.
1.Set your main playlist in a Super State.
2. Add another Super State and put your "sub playlist" (for example, Lunch Menu) into that Super State.
3. Back on the main Super State, add a Time/Clock Event that transitions to the "sub playlist" Super State at the desired time or interval, for example, at the start of lunch.
4. On the "sub playlist" Super State, add a Time/Clock Event that transitions back to the main Super State when the "sub list" should stop, for example at the end of lunch.
Remember that only events on the *current* state and Super State are listened for, so if you have multiple "sub playlists" that overlap, you'll have to add the start/end Time/Clock events on both of them and things could get complicated. -
Gary Dreyer I still run into the same problem that I originally had since I don't want to stay in the Super state for the whole lunch period. Ideally I would like to be able to create a superstate that cycles through a playlist of items that should be shown all day long. While cycling through the main playlist I want to be able to go to another super state that contains items specifically to show during lunch. Once it finishes with the lunch super state once I want it to return to the main super state where it left off. Since BrightAuthor does not let you set a period schedule for a given item in a timeline the best alternative that I found was setting the Time/Clock event but as I mentioned before this does not let you go under a 1 minute interval so the previous item will be on the screen for 1 minute before it transitions to the next item.
-
Brandon If you use a player that supports two video planes (XD, XD2, 4K) you can run both your regular playlist and your lunch playlist simultaneously, with one off-screen (X 1920, Y 1080, for example).
Then you can use a Time/Clock event to switch one is visible.
One zone runs your "all day" Super State.
The other zone runs your "lunchtime" Super State.You're saying you don't want to stay in the lunchtime Super State throughout lunchtime?
That would mean every "special" item would have to have an associated Time/Clock event.
You could end an item's visibility early by putting a Timeout event on it that either moves the zone back off-screen or switches to a transparent PNG.I think workflow-wise you're just trying to avoid having to re-create the redundant parts of the playlist when there are updates?
If so, the easiest method would be to simply Copy/Paste the "all day" Super State content to the "lunchtime" Super State (Control-A to select all, Control-C to copy, Control-V to paste) and replace its pieces as necessary.
To avoid repetition or having to calculate the time for the changeover, you can have the Time/Clock event set a user variable to either "lunchtime" or "all day", and at the end of the "all day" playlist, use a Conditional Target to determine whether to loop back to the beginning of the "all day" playlist, or to switch over to the "lunchtime" playlist.
The Time/Clock event on the lunchtime Super State would switch the user variable back to "all day" and at the end of the playlist it would switch back to the "all day" Super State.
This would make your workflow for updates:
- Clear lunchtime playlist - two keystrokes
Control-A, Delete - Copy all day playlist to lunchtime - three keystrokes
Control-A, Control-C, Control-V - Adjust lunchtime playlist - variable
- Adjust Time/Clock event to trigger lunchtime (on all day Super State)
- Adjust Time/Clock event to return to all day (on lunchtime Super State)
We can put in a feature request for Time/Clock to allow smaller granularity, but it may not be feasible as it has potential to cause issues if the requested operations don't complete within a second, which is likely.
Another option would be to use the second layer to truly "overlay" your "lunchtime" content on top of the "all day" content, but that would require putting in placeholder content in place of the "all day" stuff. That would work if your durations don't change often though.
In that case you would make a copy of the "all day" playlist in the "lunchtime" Super State, then replace all the images and video with transparent PNGs. The video placeholder would need a Timeout added for the video's duration.
Then your update workflow would be:- Replace lunchtime placeholders with applicable lunchtime content
- Adjust Time/Clock event to trigger lunchtime (on all day Super State)
- Adjust Time/Clock event to return to all day (on lunchtime Super State)
IMO the copy/paste method is less prone to mistakes.
- Clear lunchtime playlist - two keystrokes
-
Gary Dreyer Thank you for your help what I ended up doing to make it the easiest for the end user that is going to be updating this is to go back to using two super states. One for the main playlist and one for lunch special going off of your first suggestion the other day. I set the interval time to about 2 minutes (about the length of the main playlist ) for the time/clock event from the main to the lunch super state. The only difference is that the last item of the lunch superstate points back to the main superstate first item. I see what you are saying about allowing the interval to go down to seconds causing issues with timing in certain situations. Another suggestion though for future enhancement would be to allow you to set a schedule for a particular item in the playlist that would skip over an item to the next one if it was not within the scheduled period. This is similar to a feature that I had available on another system at a previous job.
Thanks
Please sign in to leave a comment.