VSign Digital Signage Platform is a powerful Digital Signage content management system and suite of signage players. Digital signage is a form of electronic display that shows information, advertising and other messages. Digital signs (such as LCD, LED, SIGNAGE MONITOR, plasma displays, or projected images) can be found in public and private environments, such as retail stores and corporate buildings. In other words, digital signs are there to service a need for information. It’s important then to ensure a good mix of information and targeted advertising to meet the business’s goals.
If you want to add a new layout, you must click on “Add Layout” button that is button at the top right of the screen. Figure 14 shows new form. Also you can upload layouts in your computer with “Import” button.
Each Region on a Layout has its own Playlist of content, which will be shown in order by the Display Client. If required a Playlist can consist of a single item (such as a company logo), or multiple items (such as an image slide show).
A Regions Playlist is viewed/edited by using the Region Menu and selecting Edit Timeline. The following form is shown.
Widgets are assigned to a Region Playlist using the « Media Toolbox » shown on the left hand side of the Region Playlist form. This toolbox lists all of the enabled media types on the CMS. Media Types can be enabled / disabled in the Modules section.
The first link in the Media Toolbox is the « Library » link. This allows stored content to be assigned directly from the CMS library. This content may have been uploaded in a different Layout, or directly into the Library.
Video resolutions and framerates must be the same for the best performance.
The CMS provides an easy to use file upload tool for adding all file based media. This tool is used when adding to the library and when adding directly onto a layout.
Uploading is done in two steps.
Files can also be added via drag and drop.
The important thing to note is that your network connection speed must be high for a large file upload to succeed.
Note: Fonts must be installed after upload. To do that, go to Library and find the font which one will be installed, then click the arrow button and select “Install Font”.
EDITING MEDIA
There are two good examples of when this might be useful.
Note that, the CMS will need to be able to validate SSL certificates are valid when it talks to third party servers (for integrations such as Twitter, Forecast IO or for RSS feeds consumed over HTTPS links) so be sure that your PHP installation is setup to allow that.
VSign has a full featured User module that allows individual access to the CMS by multiple people with user name and password authentication.
Users are administered in the CMS using the Users Menu Item in the side bar.
There are 8 menus in the CMS:
User objects have permissions configured on the object itself. The following objects have this facility:
All of these items have the permissions set in the same way, via a simple to use dialogue showing groups and users. In addition to this all permissions are validated with each form load, or save button clicked so you can guarantee « real time » modifications to the permissions on items.
The rows and columns have the following meanings:
Assigning displays to dealers can be done in two ways:
Assigning Display to Dealer is available if there is enough display limit left and if the dealer is licensed.
VSign can play videos synchronously on VSign SoC Displays. Thus, it is possible to display high-definition video on the screens when the video played on each screen is set to the portion of a single video corresponding to the screen.
Synchronization with VSign is achieved by the following operations, respectively.
The following operations can be performed with the line menu:
To add Sync Media and assign related videos to sync media, the following steps are followed on the Sync Media page.
Note: Only video can be played in sync mode.
Note: In sync mode, 60fps(frame per second) videos are recommended for higher efficiency.
In the table on the Designs page, the sync column can be used to see which designs are sync. A tick indicates that the design is synchronous.
To create a sync design, follow the steps below.
1.On the CMS Designs page, click the Add Design button at the top right
2.The “Is Sync?” option is checked from the displayed form.
3. On the campaign page, “Designs” is selected from the row menu of the added sync campaign.
4. Sync designs that you want to assign on the opened form are added. For example, in the picture below, two sync designs are assigned to the sync campaign.
The sync display is the TV SoC display of a sync display group. Sync displays can only play sync design.
To adjust the TV SoC display synchronously, perform the following steps.
For further information, please refer to the Vgn SoC Display user guide.
In the table on the Display Groups page, you can see which display group is synchronized with the “Sync” column. A tick indicates that the display group is synchronous.
The following steps are followed to create a Synchronous Display Group.
3. To assign the related Sync Screens to the sync display group, click on the row menu of the sync display group added in the table on the page to select “Group members”.
4. The synchronized screens that you want to assign on the opened form are saved according to the order.
3. Click the Create Event button from the top right controls.
4. In the form that opens, the start and end date and the synchronous design to be displayed are selected and saved.
5. The screens in the display group can start playing after downloading the sync media assigned to them when they receive the relevant settings by connecting to the CMS. If there are no other sync designs assigned to the screens, the VSign splash screen will be displayed.
In order to upload media files to Amazon Web Services CDN and make VSign Clients download files over CDN, complete the following steps:
Once maintenance script is woken up, you can optionally configure email alerts to be sent when Players stop connecting properly, and when they come back online after a period of downtime. In order to send email notifications, complete following steps:
[your CMS domain name]/maintenance.php
[your CMS domain name]/maintenance.php?key=changeme
Globally enable or disable the sending of email alerts. You can enable/disable alerts for individual displays in Display Management.
The secret key required to allow the maintenance script to run when « Maintenance Enabled » is set to « Protected » mode.
If set to “On” will mean for each offline display, you’ll receive an email every time the maintenance.php routine is run. If set to “Off” will mean that you’ll be notified only once per downtime period.
The time in minutes after you last see a Player connect to the CMS that you consider it to have gone offline. It can be overridden on a per-display settings profile basis should you need that. Do not set this value lower than your normal Player collection interval. The default is 30 minutes.
In some cases it’s also useful to alert users if a Player goes offline. If you want to alert all users who have view permissions to a display,
In order to decide which Displays you want to receive alerts for, complete following steps
If you aren’t using Display Settings Profiles, be sure to tick the Use Global Timeout tick box. So that the value you set earlier for the time a display needs to be offline before you’re alerted is used. If you’re using Display Settings Profiles, then if that box is unticked, the display collection interval from the Display Profile is used instead.
The CMS generates log output when it’s running, and also receives log output from the Players connected to it for the purposes of debugging and checking the system’s state. It can also collect proof of play records called Statistics. All these records are held in the database and should be purged periodically to keep the size of the database manageable and to prevent system performance problems. The maintenance script performs that function.
In order to configure log and statistics retention related settings, complete following steps:
[your CMS domain name]/maintenance.php
[your CMS domain name]/maintenance.php?key=changeme
How many days worth of log messages to keep. Logs older than this will be deleted. Set to 0 to keep all logs indefinitely.
How many days worth of statistics to keep. Statistics older than this will be deleted. Set to 0 to keep all statistics indefinitely.
In order to set CMS timezone, complete following steps:
CMS Timezone must not be confused with User Timezone. User Timezone (configured via Administration -> Users page) is used in all dates displayed on CMS pages. However in the background User Timezone is converted to CMS Timezone and is saved as CMS Timezone. Dates must be global for all Displays connected to CMS (eg Schedules are sent to Displays in CMS time zone).
To renew CMS license key, complete following steps. CMS License key must be given by your CMS Administrator. CMS License Key limits total Display count, CMS License start and end dates.
If key is not accepted, the warning window pops and key is not updated.
The CMS has a central repository for all Log information, including the Players which send back Log information with each collection from the CMS.
The Log is split into Functions and Pages for easy searching. The Log page is located under the “Advanced” section of the Menu.
The fields of the log table are listed below: