Brightsign Players

PIXILAB Blocks can be used with Brightsign players supporting HTML5 content. Brightsign players provide reliable 24/7 playback performance, compatible with most display devices. They connect directly to your network (wired connection recommended), and many models can even be powered over the network wire (using power-over-ethernet, also known as POE).

In addition to the display functions, Brightsign players also support power control over many displays connected over HDMI, using the CEC-signal in the HDMI standard. Some players come with extra video inputs, allowing the video output to be switched between the Block Spot and an external HDMI input.

Blocks uses Brightsign's HTML5 rendering mode exclusively. In this mode, ideo playback on many Brightsign models is limited to a single video only. Also, for performance reasons, video must be played using the player's "overlay" method, resulting in the following limitations.

• Other content, including text, buttons and other blocks, can not appear on top of video.
• Some transitions involving video content don't work, and always result in a "cut" transition.
• Synchronization between Brightsign players is not possible.
• Synchronization accuracy from Brightsign player to other spot is very poor.

Brightsign players are configured by a file on the SD card inserted into the player before turning it on. Follow these steps to configure your player.

1. Obtain a suitable SD card, keeping in mind that newer Brightsign players use micro-SD cards while older models use full size cards. See "How to select an SD card" for more information.
2. Format the card as FAT32 (sometimes called MS-DOS).
3. Download and extract the configuration file.
4. Make any required changes to the autorun.brs file (see below).
5. Copy the resulting autorun.brs file to the SD card.
6. Insert the SD card into the Brightsign player, connect display, network and power.

While the default settings in the enclosed autorun.brs file may suffice in many cases, there are some settings you may need to change depending on your network configuration. To do so, open the autorun.brs file using a plain text editor (such as TextEdit or BBEdit on the Mac or Notepad++ on Windows – avoid "word processor" style editors since those may result in a corrupted configuration file).

At the top of the file, you'll see the following:

'Configurable parameters: ----------------------------------------
videoMode = "1920x1080x50p"
transform = "identity"	'Screen rotation; one of "identity", "rot90", "rot270"
serverAddress = "pixi.guide"

network = CreateObject("roNetworkConfiguration", 0)

'Use dynamic address
network.SetDHCP()

'OR set fixed IP address of player, if required, to be independent of DHCP
'If so, comment the line above, uncomment the following lines, and set desired values
'network.SetIP4Address("192.168.0.25")
'network.SetIP4Netmask("255.255.255.0")
'network.SetIP4Broadcast("192.168.0.255")
'network.SetIP4Gateway("192.168.0.1")

Set the videoMode parameter to the desired video mode. When editing this text, take care not to remove the double-quotes around the video mode, or accidentally change those from straight to curly quotes.

If your network doesn't have a DNS pointing pixi.guide to the Blocks server, you need to change the serverAddress parameter to the address of your server. This may be a fixed IP number, possibly followed by a port number, separated by a colon, when using a non-standard port, like this:

serverAddress = "192.168.0.10:8080"

Again, make sure to keep the straight double quotes around the value.

Our Linux-based Blocks server has a built in DNS and DHCP server configured to resolve pixi.guide to the server's address. Thus, if you're using our Linux-based Blocks server, with those services enabled and properly configured, you should not need to change the serverAddress parameter.

Finally, you have the option of either allowing the Brightsign player to obtain its IP address automatically (the default configuration), or manually assigning the address parameters. In most cases, a local network has a DHCP server which removes the need to assign addresses manually. If you must assign an address manually, change the network section of the configuration by commenting out the line containing "SetDHCP" (by putting a single, straight quote sign at the beginning of the line), uncomment the following four lines beginning with "network.", and set their parameters as desired, like this:

'Use dynamic address
'network.SetDHCP()

'OR set fixed IP address of player, if required, to be independent of DHCP
'If so, comment the line above, uncomment the following lines, and set desired values
network.SetIP4Address("192.168.0.25")
network.SetIP4Netmask("255.255.255.0")
network.SetIP4Broadcast("192.168.0.255")
network.SetIP4Gateway("192.168.0.1")