Signboard Update
Just a quick note to let you know that Signboard (the affordable DIY digital signage solution for churches) has been updated with support for time zones and DST. This was done to help insure that the time offset for events coming from Google Calendar stay correct throughout the year.
The updated files are available for download now. The specific file that was updated is left.php (which parses the events for the left ticker on the default configuration.
For the uninitiated, Signboard is a cheap, DIY digital signage solution for churches. Built in Flash and managed in the cloud. More info at http://www.getsignboard.com
If you’re using Signboard, don’t forget to email me a photo.
Free Digital Signage from MediaSignage.com
I like digital signage. I enjoyed coming up with a solution for HHBC last year (check it out at getsignboard.com) and I’ve been dreaming of putting more time and resources into further development but I just haven’t gotten to it.
Now it looks like I might not have to.
The very talented designer and fellow Oklahoman, Brandon Knight, just made me privy to MediaSignage.com. MediaSignage.com offers a free software as a service (they also have an enterprise option) that, in short, offers free digital signage, in the cloud, with browser and desktop applications available. It looks like this solution is super easy to customize and it even supports streaming video.
That’s tight.
I’m going to give MediaSignage.com a more in-depth look this coming week, but it certainly looks like a good solution if you don’t feel like messing with the, admittedly, technical installation required by what we’ve got going with Signboard.
Thanks for the tip, Brandon!
More Digital Signage
It turns out a colleague down the street created his own digital signage as well and it looks rad!
Roll Your Own Digital Signage 2.0
A while back, I wrote a series of posts detailing how I created a digital signage solution of Henderson Hills Baptist Church using modified AppleTV.
While the hacked AppleTV worked well enough, it was not quite as robust as I wanted, could not play video well, and would not auto-scale for different display sizes. So I’ve been working on a new solution.
Now I have something ready to show. We’re using this solution at our Edmond Campus and it’s been received well. The video below shows it working:
Here’s a graphic that shows how everything works.
I’ve created a website to help your church do the same thing with DIY digital signage. Check it out at http://www.getsignboard.com
ScreenScape: Use the Web to Create Digital Display Ads
Oh snap! I’ve been looking for a service like this to come out. My hopes were up when I discovered Your Screen a while back, but they seem to be dead in the water.
At first glance ScreenScape seems to do what I created a while back with a hacked AppleTV (which we hope to deploy soon). Take a look and let us know what you think in the comments!
UPDATE: ScreenScape is rad and if you’re a non-profit you can get a free account here: http://screenscape.net/npo
Roll Your Own Digital Signage with an AppleTV: Assembling the Pieces
In my last post about creating your own digital signage solution with an AppleTV, I told you how I prepared my device. In this post I’ll introduce the pieces and talk about how I pieced them together. This post will likely be the last in this series, but I want to encourage anybody who is working on their own solution to build upon what I have here and share with the rest of the community. Digital Signange systems are mad expensive and the majority of churches won’t be able to afford one. But maybe if we work together we can get something built that is far better than what I have here. I’ll talk more about how this system can be improved at the end of the post. Let’s get started!
The Pieces:
- SlideShow Pro
SlideShow Pro is a Flash extension and customizeable SWF that, in short, allows you to create ultra slick, XML driven slideshows. SSP also includes support for video. When I came up with the idea to smash a digital signage solution together, this is the first component I thought of. It’s great and cheap at $39! - SlideShow Director
SlideShow Director is a web app installed on your server (though hosting is available for a fee) and in this case acts as a slick back end to manage the media displayed on your sign. It’s really a fantastic app. With it you will be able to upload content (images and video), create new albums, activate, deactivate and resort media, set hold times for your still images and with a very recent update you can even schedule when certain media items appear! Definately worth the $39. - Weather Widget
For the weather widget, I found this SWF at FlashDen. I spent a little time stripping it down to just the weather icon and tempature and then was easily able to set it to our local weather. - Clock Widget
For the clock I opted to go with a digital display as it was easier to read from a distance. This SWF, also at FlashDen, was perfect! I can customize it to a degree and it also just works and looks pretty neat as well. The inclusion of this clock is why we had to adjust the AppleTV’s internal clock. Otherwise the clock might be a few hours off.
I should note, also, that the above widgets will use the system font available on the AppleTV so if you are hoping to use a different font to display the time and tempature, you’ll need to set those fonts in Flash and then make sure the font is embeded in the Flash. - RSS Ticker
The RSS ticker at the bottom of the sign pulls in a feed from our church calendar but you can have it pull in headlines from anywhere. You might consider setting up a specific feed for the ticker so that you can give more specific information in the headlines since nobody will be clicking on them. To get this done I used the Javascript script found here.
Put it all together:
Finally, I put all the pieces together in a HTML web page. The page I built is a simple, 2-column layout with a footer. I had to do some finagling with the widths and heights to get things looking right on the specific monitor I was using so if you use the file I have as a starting point, you’ll want to tweak it as necessary.
Once the page is built, just drop in your SWFs and the RSS script and you’re good to go.
Put it on the big screen:
To put your signage on your screen, just browse to the web page that you created in the browser on the AppleTV. You might want to bookmark it for easy access later. Also, you will need to refresh the page anytime a change is made to your media rotation is SlideShow Director.
Things that could improve:
To close, I want to aknowledge some shortcomings of the current set-up that I have and put the call out for help improving on what I have done so far so that the community can share:
- Video performance is poor.
Video performance on this thing is sad. You might expect differently from something made for video, but I suspect this has something to do with running the video through Flash which may not take advantage of all the resources of the AppleTV’s hardware.
I’ve tried messed around with different ways of compressing the video and, short of making the actual video dimensions smaller, had little luck getting any performance boost. Performance is not so horrible that a simple animation won’t play. But for 30fps video, forget it.
I imagine that getting better video performance would take some serious hacking. One solution might be to run this setup on a MacMini. I have not tried it yet, but I would think performance would be much better. A MacMini based solution would also negate all the jailbreaking stuff we had to do at the start. Unfortunately it would come at a higher hardware cost. - Does not scale instantly based on screen size.
This system would be much cooler if it could detect the display size that it was set up to and automatically scale appropriately. I’m not versed enough in Javascript or similar technologies, but it seems like this could be done. - Still comes at a cost.
In addition to the cost of the AppleTV, the pieces of this signage puzzle still come at a cost. Granted that cost is under $150, but it sure would be nice if the church community had a one-box solution that handled the media management, ticker and additional widgets. It might not be as slick, but imagine being able to download an installer onto a USB drive, plugging it into the back of your AppleTV and then having it set all this up for you in an instant. That’s be sweet!
Well, that’s all I got! I hope the information in these posts was useful. I’ve included a link to the HTML page I used to piece everything together. You’ll have to purchase the other components yourself.
If you are interested in helping me carry this project further, please get in touch! I’d love to partner with some people who are more skilled than I in these sorts of areas. You can reach me at eric [at] ericgranata [dot] com.
Roll Your Own Digital Signage with an AppleTV: Preparing Your Device
Now I continue on with building a digital signage solution with an AppleTV. There seems to be some interest in the project. Thanks to those who commented on the intro post.
In this post I will discuss the steps taken to prepare the AppleTV for the rest of the abuse that we’ll put it through. It took me forever to complete the steps below due to a bit of trial and error, locating hard to find software, and working on a project involving the type of tinkering that I had not done before. Let’s get started:
Unlock your AppleTV’s potential
The first thing you’ll need to do is jailbreak your AppleTV. There are a lot of ways to do this. But unless you’ve done it before, you will find it worth your time and money to use the handy software provided at atvflash.com($50). Using this software, you’ll skip ahead quite a bit by not only jailbreaking your device in a super simple way, but you’ll avoid the hassle of having to install the Webkit web browser on your device. This app will do it for you.- Enable Flash (get a headache)
This part gave me the most trouble but it would have been a sinch if I was certain I was using the right tools. You need to enable Flash Player on the AppleTV. If you are using ATV Flash, then all you need to do is find the ChoreAudioKit.framework from a Mac OSX 10.4.10 (intel) installation, and upload it to your AppleTV using an FTP client or Terminal. Then run the Install Flash utility found in your AppleTV’s maintinence menu. Boom! Now when browsing the internet on your AppleTV, Flash will work instead of showing you a blue Lego with a question mark. Like I said, this was hard for me because I thought I had the right version of ChoreAudioKit.framework so when it did not work, I destroyed my brain trying to figure out what was going wrong. Finally I double checked my version of the framework and realized my mistake. It MUST be from OSX 10.4.10 (intel). Has to be the version for the Intel processors and has to be the dot-ten version. Dot-ten is not the same as dot-one! Less (but still) vague instructions on this step are found here. Let me know if you have any trouble with this step. - Set the system clock
For reasons that will become clear in a later post, it is important for you to make sure your AppleTV’s system clock is set to your local time zone. I don’t remember what the time zone was set to when I got to this step in my own work. But it was not US Central Standard, so I had to change it. At this point you will need to launch the Terminal app on your Mac and then login via SSH to your AppleTV (your Mac and AppleTV should be on the same network). You should then follow the instructions found here. To many of you, this might make sense. For me, this was the first time I really used Terminal for anything so I was a little intimidated, but it all worked out pretty easily.
That’s it! Your AppleTV already does some pretty sweet tricks what with Flash enabled internet browsing and Boxee on it! Good times.
Have fun playing with its new features while I get together the next post where I introduce more pieces to the puzzle and then begin to piece it all together.
Roll Your Own Digital Signage with an AppleTV: Intro
A while ago, I was charged with the task of looking into AppleTV’s usefullness as a digital signage solution. I knew what I wanted. I wanted the signs to be able to be updated offsite. I wanted to be able to browse to a website, login, upload images and edit their display order. It’d be cool if I could add a ticker at the bottom to pull headlines from our church’s website and maybe a clock and weather widget.
Well, I’ve accomplished this for the most part through the smashing together of a few off the shelf tools. Total cost for this project (minus the TV) was less than $400. Does it do everything? No. But it works, and it was fun. And maybe, with your help, it can be better.
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be blogging about the steps I took to get to where this project is today, talking about ways it might be better, and ultimately putting the call out for some of you guys who are far smarter than I am to help make this a solution that any church can use with little effort or cost.
Stay tuned.
