Church Tech Dump

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
   
3. 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.