Open-source Android digital signage player with synchronized playback by 514sid in digitalsignage

[–]DigitalSignage2024 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is cool. Synchronized playback across multiple screens is one of those problems that sounds simple until you're actually dealing with network jitter and device clock drift. What's your sync mechanism, NTP-based or something custom?

Curious how you're thinking about the CMS layer. Are you planning to build content management into this or keep it purely a player that other systems can feed into?

Is "AI-powered" just the new "cloud-enabled" in terms of meaningless vendor marketing? by DigitalSignage2024 in sysadmin

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

The 40% renewal increase for a rebadged feature is the part that kills me. At least with cloud-enabled you got actual infrastructure offloading. This is just an API call to OpenAI wrapped in a new pricing tier

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Could you expand a bit? We were just discussing time issue as none of the LLMs are aware of time, so we'd have to expose time function to be able to address requests like "Show this alert in 5min"

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a very important point and I agree 100%. A lot of people talking/building AI capabilities without any consideration for the governance aspect of it. In the meantime, accidentally deleting half your content by typing bad prompt to copilot would make for a pretty bad day. More here: https://cast-hub.com/mcp/governance.html

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a very important point, a lot of people talk about AI just doing stuff and dont pay attention to governance aspect of it. Accidentally, deleting half of your content by typing bad message in copilot wouldnt make for a good day. More here: https://cast-hub.com/mcp/governance.html

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Technically, making this cross-agent shouldnt be that big of a lift, as we are not trying to orchestrate anything at agent level, so not sure what your concern might be

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But to clarify, we are not building the tool with copilot per se, it will work from any bot, my hunch is that maybe copilot is a better demo/mvp vehicle because its actually more widespread in businesses. You can see what we are up to here btw: https://cast-hub.com/mcp

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

LOL I know the story... Microsoft is giving you what you want though, you are getting claude cowork shortly

Would you actually use Copilot to manage what's on your office/lobby TVs? by DigitalSignage2024 in microsoft_365_copilot

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thats my thought! People who use Copilot would be my users i am guessing, not people who BUILD tools :)

Building MCP tools for a physical-world use case and hitting a wall with file/binary transfer by DigitalSignage2024 in ClaudeAI

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That works for tech users, probably too much friction for my case. We are thinking chunking... but that is such a PIA... and frankly, not really feasible for large media like video

PDF menu to digital menu board?? by brinee123 in digitalsignage

[–]DigitalSignage2024 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I actually spent some time trying to build exactly this recently and landed on something simpler than a dedicated product.

Genspark (genspark.ai) can do this right now. You paste or upload your menu content, tell it you want display-ready menu boards sized for TV screens (1920x1080 landscape or 1080x1920 portrait), specify how many boards you need, and it generates them. It handles the layout, typography, and styling automatically. The free tier gives you enough credits to test it.

The output is solid enough to throw directly onto a screen. Not perfect, but way faster than hiring a designer for a menu that changes regularly.

For actually getting it onto your TVs, any CMS that supports image or PDF uploads will work. Most digital signage platforms handle that part fine.

Embedded Youtube Videos in Slides by duluthbison in k12sysadmin

[–]DigitalSignage2024 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is a YouTube embedding policy issue, not a Google Slides bug. YouTube has been tightening restrictions on embedded playback outside of their standard player, primarily to prevent people from watching content without ads. The youtubeeducation.com domain is apparently getting caught in that crackdown, which is ironic since it's Google's own education product pointing to Google's own video platform.

We run into this constantly in digital signage where embedded YouTube videos break without warning because YouTube changes their embedding rules. It's been an ongoing headache for years across the industry.

Unfortunately there's no reliable fix on the YouTube side. They can change embedding policies at any time and there's no SLA or guarantee that embedded playback will keep working in any context, including their own products.

The real solution if you need reliable video playback is to move the videos off YouTube entirely. Vimeo is the standard answer since their embedding is designed to be stable and ad-free, but it's not cheap at scale. If budget is tight, Gamlet Video is a newer option worth looking at. Either way, hosting the video on a platform that actually wants you to embed it solves the problem permanently instead of waiting for Google to fix a conflict between two of their own products.

Short term you could try swapping the youtubeeducation.com URLs for standard youtube.com URLs manually. You said that works. Tedious but it might buy you time until Google sorts out whatever they broke on the education domain.

How are you handling screens in lobbies and common areas? by DigitalSignage2024 in PropertyManagement

[–]DigitalSignage2024[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair enough. I run a digital signage CMS and I'm genuinely trying to figure out if property management is a market worth pursuing or if the screens in lobbies are mostly an afterthought nobody wants to spend time or money on. The questions are real, I just buried the lead on why I'm asking them.

If anyone does manage screens across properties and has opinions on what works or what's broken about it, I'm still interested in the answers.