Signage engineering, written down
How XMDS actually works, why video walls drift, what to demand from a licensing model: the things we wish someone had written down before we had to work them out.
Self-hosted vs cloud signage CMS: what you're actually choosing
Both models schedule the same content. What differs is who holds it, who patches the server at 11pm, and what you're left with on the day you stop paying.
Read the article →Open-source vs commercial signage players: what a licence actually buys
Free players are free to licence, not free to run. The costs that never appear on an invoice, and the point at which an estate stops being able to absorb them.
4 min readXibo® vs BrightSign® isn't a choice: it's a stack
Search "Xibo vs BrightSign" and you'll find comparison after comparison, almost all answering the wrong question. They aren't rivals; they're two layers of one stack.
4 min readHow XMDS works: the protocol behind every Xibo® display
Every Xibo® display speaks XMDS. Understanding its lifecycle (register, authorize, collect, play, report) explains almost every signage problem you'll ever debug.
4 min readConsumer Android boxes vs solid-state players for Xibo® signage
An Android box is cheaper on the purchase order and more expensive everywhere else. Here's the honest engineering case, and when a box is genuinely the right answer.
3 min readMigrating from Xibo® for Android to BrightSign®, display by display
The good news about this migration is how little of it there is. Your CMS doesn't change at all, and you can do it one screen at a time, with both player types running side by side.
3 min readWhy video walls drift: sync groups, genlock and PTP
A wall that drifts is usually a wall that was bought wrong. What frame-accurate sync actually requires, and why no software can rescue a mixed-model wall on Wi-Fi.
3 min readPer-device licensing vs cloud seats: what to demand from a signage vendor
Licensing looks like a procurement detail until an outage, an RMA, or a vendor exit turns it into an operational one. Four questions worth asking first.
3 min readIntroducing XiPlay: full-feature signage, one license
Why we built a BrightSign® player for Xibo® CMS, and why one license unlocks everything, whether you run one screen or a thousand.
1 min readWhy your screens should never go black
A black screen in a lobby is worse than stale content: it reads as broken. Here's why players go dark, and the architecture that prevents it.
3 min readReady to light up your screens?
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