Xibo Drawbacks

[penfold]

I know there are lots of threads on here with the discussion of what Digital Signage to use, but I've been tasked of reviewing Digital Signage and need to look at a range of products. The thing is, as I've used XIBO and to be honest quite like it I keep looking at other products and thinking they dont offer anything we would use over XIBO. Potentially it will be used over a couple of sites but other than that all I can see it being used for is our created content which I've found Xibo to be fine for.

 

Personally at the moment I'm going to recommend XIBO, but want to present an unbiased case. So can anyone list any obvious limitations that I've missed?

[Sylv3r]

We've been playing with XIBO for a good few months now and recently rolled out out to our 8 screens around the school - haven't come up with any issues or limitations up to now and I imagine if we did for what is effectively a free product we would just put up with it if there was any major flaws.

 

We had a bit of a homebrew html page initially and for how effective it was, we decided to go down the XIBO route as it seemed more sleeker.

[glennda]

The only limitations i've found (not that i've played with many others) is that you can't get it to automatically put the date and time at the bottom. instead i just downloaded a javascript clock with date and displayed through HTML. Never found anything i can't get around using it.

[penfold]

Thanks, like you if I've found anything it didn't do I've put up with or changed what I was trying to do slightly.

[Sylv3r]

Yeah, we used a java widget for our time / clock got us up and running no problem.

[Guest Guest]

Theres a few bugs which are well documented and easy to get around such as video not looping unless you put a 1 second text timeline after the video timeline.

 

Also if you don't change the displayed layoout very often it can crash.

 

But as said, if you know a bit of web design there is little it can't do.

[AngryTechnician]

I have to say I gave Xibo a try a couple of weeks, and after the numerous recommendations on here I found it very disappointing.

 

I scoured the documentation (which I found to be a bit lacking), and still don't know what I could have been doing wrong, but I couldn't even get it to display a PowerPoint without the client crashing. I found the layout editor very clunky, and the client seemed very slow to pick up layout changes, even after adjusting the settings.

 

In the end we decided to just use ShowPoint for now and do everything in PowerPoint slides with embedded web content via LiveWeb.

[RabbieBurns]

We rolled out Xibo to one of our schools as a trial, and was back recently to notice the big 60" Tv in the foyer was turned off. After enqiuring what was up and if the Xibo client / server had gone down etc, was told that basically it took too long for the headmistress to create the designs, and that what was on there was out of date so they turned it off.

 

I dont know if you guys are expected to do the creation and all that stuff but that is way out our remit and delegated to whovever is using it, but she just said that it took too long to load photos and create the displays once a week.

 

I dont know if there is any easy way to do this or if she is doing it a long way or if there is an easy way to just dump photos in a folder and then it starts cycling through them? I think she is adding photos one at a time to something (havent actually used xibo myself just oversaw the project done by a jr)

[penfold]

I have to say I gave Xibo a try a couple of weeks, and after the numerous recommendations on here I found it very disappointing.

 

I scoured the documentation (which I found to be a bit lacking), and still don't know what I could have been doing wrong, but I couldn't even get it to display a PowerPoint without the client crashing. I found the layout editor very clunky, and the client seemed very slow to pick up layout changes, even after adjusting the settings.

 

In the end we decided to just use ShowPoint for now and do everything in PowerPoint slides with embedded web content via LiveWeb.

 

I found that once you had it setup correctly there was very little problem with updates being applied and most of the problems seem to be with ensuring I had installed the right plugins in IE. That being said, I was the one who was doing the updating but for what I have been asked to do, the updates will be coming from someone else. As most poeple seem to know their way around powerpoint, I'll also take a look at Showpoint too. The only problem I had with Xibo editing was due to our AV scanning the files in use which sometimes caused the editor to hang.

[penfold]

We rolled out Xibo to one of our schools as a trial, and was back recently to notice the big 60" Tv in the foyer was turned off. After enqiuring what was up and if the Xibo client / server had gone down etc, was told that basically it took too long for the headmistress to create the designs, and that what was on there was out of date so they turned it off.

 

I dont know if you guys are expected to do the creation and all that stuff but that is way out our remit and delegated to whovever is using it, but she just said that it took too long to load photos and create the displays once a week.

 

I dont know if there is any easy way to do this or if she is doing it a long way or if there is an easy way to just dump photos in a folder and then it starts cycling through them? I think she is adding photos one at a time to something (havent actually used xibo myself just oversaw the project done by a jr)

 

This is the thing for me, any system put in place needs to be updated otherwise it becomes pretty useless. Therefore any software we look at using is going to have some element of admin involved. When I have wanted to dump a load of photo's(in Xibo) I created a video using photostory as recomended on here and uploaded that. I also think it actually looks a bit better because it adds movement to the images(but that's just my personal opinion).

 

I do think that I may end up recomending Xibo (at least to trial) to see if a dedicated system provides more benefits that just using a method suggested by @AngryTechnician.

 

Edit: Currently we have powerpoints created (by departments) when displays are used for specific events. But these are a bit basic and then dont get updated very often which is the problem we have.

Edited November 25, 2011 by penfold

[RabbieBurns]

So if she uses photostory to create a collage she can then just upload that 1 file?

 

That might be a better option for her. Thanks for the heads up.

 

As an aside, we used to use OneLan in my last school, which is one of the more expensive paid for digital signage solutions. The advantage of that was it came with half a days training to the ladies who were using it were taught how to get to grips with it from the off. However with that it was just a case of FTPing a bunch of JPGs to a Folder and then it cycled thru them.

[Guest Guest]

There's a thread on here about allowing updating from word documents, that should make it easier for admin staff/teachers to update content

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/85502-xibo-accomplishments.html

[ChrisH]

I have been playing with those methods mentioned in the thread and the word doc saved as a htm file works fine it updates it straight away and you just use word to edit. The only thing you need to do is know how much of the page you can use.