You can buy ready-to-use SMIL-Players that are compatible with our CMS from various vendors. These use both their own software solutions and ours.
In this article, you will learn more about our media player software. You can use this to create your own digital signage hardware or even offer SMIL players yourself as a vendor.
We use the term SMIL player to refer to digital signage players that use the standardized language SMIL to control their playlist.
We support the free Garlic-Player and also push its further development. It was designed with the focus to run on as many operating systems as possible, and it works with the industry standard SMIL.
The Garlic-Player is currently available for Windows, Linux, macOS and for Android. This expands the range of SMIL-Players offered and allows you, among other things, to create your hardware solutions.
This allows you to select media player hardware that optimally meets your requirement and makes you independent of third-party vendors. The Garlic-Player as a genuine digital signage open-source software ensures the highest possible transparency, investment security and freedom.
SMIL-Players are compatible regardless of the manufacturer. Using a SMIL-Player for your digital signage project gives you more independence. You can choose among different software providers or even develop your own components.
Specialized media players for digital signage require certain features. Here is an excerpt from the features of the Garlic-Player with explanations and examples:
In addition to videos and images, SMIL Player also supports widgets. These are locally executable web apps that you can use to create interactive interfaces and specialized applications. Since they are based on HTML, they run platform-independently.
Split your screen into different zones. These zones can even overlap. This is how you implement news tickers.
However, it is possible to use multiple zones to display additional information about videos and images and to make more efficient use of large advertising space.
Anyone who sells advertising time requires playback statistics. Customers want to know when their ads ran on which devices. Without reporting, there is no reputable advertising marketing. However, reports and logs support remote maintenance and diagnosis of possible problems. The Garlic-Player periodically sends its reports to a CMS.
Normally, the content runs in an infinite loop. You use timing triggers to determine whether a particular piece of content interrupts the loop. For example, you might want a video to run daily starting at 1 pm and then every hour on the hour until 6 pm. Timed triggers exist for this purpose.
These are basically triggers similar to the timed triggers described above. In this case, you start content either via a keyboard hotkey or by touching a specific image or video.
Example: a customer taps on the screen while a video is playing. You determine whether another video with more information is played or a web page opens.
The Garlic-Player has an integrated web server. You can use this to send commands to the device via network. This allows the SMIL-Player to be controlled by another application or a web page.
Example network trigger: you want to display an image of a product with the current price as soon as a connected barcode scanner sends the corresponding signal.
Example queue calling system: The clerk calls a customer. The SMIL-Player receives the signal and then displays the corresponding number.
A Digital Signage API takes your project to the next level.
Feature sets and interfaces aren't worth much if no one knows how they work. Having free documentation without pesky non-disclosure agreements is the key. SMIL is already extensively documented by the W3C. This is one of the most fundamental advantages of relying on standards.
Of course, there is also documentation and tutorials for the Garlic-Player.
The player is developed independently of SmilControl and has its own website. Download SMIL-Player.
More information Garlic-Player.
To determine the optimal player for you from a number of hardware partners, we offer a free first consultation.
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