Xibo

Transitions between slides / scenes

Asked by beamedads

I'm very enthousiastic about how easy Xibo can be setup.

However the transitions between slides/scenes is far from smooth. Especially with url, flash and movie. It's really building up the url when already visible. Also for flash and movie it first shows a black block with loading and again with unloading.

I've seen another propriaty system based on phyton and linux which prepared the next slide in the background (I think they use a second desktop) and then smoothly faded the slide when needed. This was really nice and the same technology was used on the big movie cinema screen for which professionalism is even more important.

I would really appreciate if you can improve xibo on this core area.

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Alex Harrington (alexharrington) said : 		#1

It's a really tricky balance to strike.

If you don't display the page until it finishes rendering then on some pages you'd never display anything because the page continually loads in the background and the browser is aware of this.

With flash it's even harder as the browser is happy that the page has rendered as soon as the flash plugin has loaded. If the flash content then has to buffer or stream then I'm not aware at the moment of any general way of being able to detect that.

Alex

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beamedads (info-beamedads) said : 		#2

Thanks for the quick anser.

True that somewhere it's needed to find a balance. Maybe it's good enought to do a configureable fade-in fade-out in seconds (milliseconds) which can be set in the layout editor. Then no need to wait until the page finishes loading. The display is building the screen during the fade-in for let's say 1 sec which then feels smooth.

I can imagine that this might have impact on core modules. Of course I'm not sure about this and just looking from a user point of view. At least in my optinion there is a cap between the current Xibo solution and the perfect Xibo solution :-)

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Alex Harrington (alexharrington) said : 		#3

Fade In/Out transitions are already supported in the linux/python client - although there's no server available yet to tell the client to do that.

It'll come with time.

Alex

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beamedads (info-beamedads) said : 		#4

Hi Alex, good to hear about the linux client. I tried on a fedora box without luck so I will setup the box with the ubuntu as listed in the install notes.

I've collected some information from the programmer and indeed you're right. He confirmed that the url was not created in a background desktop or something like that. He uses a browser demon so the demon stays always available. Same for the media player. Probably you are already doing this.

Kind regards,
Bob

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beamedads (info-beamedads) said : 		#5

I've managed to install the python client on Ubuntu 9.10 following the installation guide. The results is really promissing! The transactions were really more smooth. The transparancy of the flash clock was handled properly in this linux client (the windows client shows a white backgroud box).

I've installed on an older notebook with celeron M 1.6Ghz and an embedded intel graphics 945gm. The only pitfall I run into was that I install the xibo (bzr ... ) under the root account and ./run.sh as root. It will then prompt with an ERROR: setting SDL video mode failed: OpenGL not available. When I chmod -R the /opt/xibo to my normal user and ./run.sh as normal user then it was starting properly. Full screen is also very good, although it shifts back to a window after some time, probably to do with my screensaving settings.

Just wanted to share my findings!

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