Even the best-designed playlists can fail to play as expected if a few common setup mistakes sneak in. Whether you’re new to creating playlists or an advanced user, it’s easy to overlook small details that have a big impact. In this article, we’ll walk you through the 10 most common mistakes that prevent playlists from running smoothly—and show you how to avoid them.
Usually, new users run their playlist directly from the online Studio CMS (using the preview or web player URL).
Well, running the playlist from a browser (we have a mean for that, called “HTML player app”) is possible and provides a partial solution (some things will not work well using this way).
However, the right way will be using a dedicated app for this: either the Android, Windows, ChromeOS, webOS (LG), Tizen (Samsung) or Linux player app.
The screen key (sometimes being called “player key”) is a long hexadecimal text string which is unique and represents a player in the online Studio.
Adding it to a device, will allow that device to play the content which was assigned to play on that player/screen key.
Not to mention that each screen key should be added to a different device (that is the best practice we recommend of).
If you use the same screen key in more than one device, you will mess up your Screen Monitor(https://reports.novisign.com), so you’ll have to use the Device Monitor instead.
Make sure you copy the screen key correctly (no hash sign in the end, no space in between, not omitting the dashes).
The best thing is to login from the player app to your account and just choose your screen, rather than involving with manually typing the key.
Make sure you have the latest version of the app. It can be seen in the top right corner of the entrance screen of the app which you installed on the playing device (i.e. something that looks like 5.1.25-5).
This is not the version of the online Studio (which appears in your browser in the top left corner of the screen if you simultaneously press the Ctrl key and the left mouse button when hovering above NoviSign’s logo there).
We keep developing new elements in the Studio, we also make changes to the apps in order to support the new features, so using an old version of the app might not work with new features.
When you create your content, you better already make it suitable to the actual hardware you’re going to use, because once the media player downloads your content, it will be played as is. That means it won’t be downscaled according your hardware.
For example: if you made a playlist of 4K (3840x2160p) images and 4K videos and you’re using a full HD (1920x1080p) Android media player connected to a TV, then you will probably experience issues, since that media player will have hard time to display the 4K images (will take more than a second to load each one) and while trying to display the 4K videos the player app might crash again and again.
So, content is the king, but make sure that your king is suitable to cross the castle gate to the crowd.
When adding a creative as a slide to a playlist in the online Studio (in the “Playlists” tab), the slide duration (that means, how long, in seconds, will the slide be played in its turn) is taken from the creative’s definition.
Images (simple creatives which were added from the “Media Library” to the “Creative” tab) have a default of 10 seconds duration and some of the composed creatives (those which you created using the creative composer by clicking the “Create Creative” button in the “Creatives” tab) also have the 10 seconds default, unless there is a video or a slideshow widget within.
You can also manually change the default duration in the creative itself.
Anyway, please notice that you might want to change the 10 seconds duration of some of the slides within a playlist, otherwise their duration will be very short.
Some users install the player app without the manual. Later on, some things do not work well or do not work at all.
You should use the installation manual in order to prevent issues.
Installing the native Android app has its own default settings.
However, in some cases, you need to change the default settings to something else in order to make the app work optimally or just work.
The most common setting which might be altered is the “Video To Video Transition” under the “Display” block of settings.
This is the mode of transition from video to video, video to image, image to video and image to image (in order to make it smooth and not sharp). There are several options. The default one is “Auto”.
In case you get a red error message where you’re supposed to see a video running, you’ll need to change it (probably to “High Compatibility”, but not necessarily. You should try and see).
In some of the weak Android devices and in some firmware types the change is be a must.
Like the previous one, this is another common setting that might needs to be changed. In some cases, you will need to set it to “off” (the default is on).
Usually, in smartphones which run the native Android app.
This setting provides better performance for rolling text as RSS feed, ticker and Twitter widgets, but in some devices the better performance won’t work and you’ll get a black screen instead.
That means, you need to turn this off.
The “Display Notifications” setting (under the “Display” block of settings) displays connectivity/loading notifications, warnings and errors on screen.
The default is set to on, but after setting up an Android machine with a specific playlist, you’re supposed to turn it off. Just make sure there are no issues running your playlist.
After it is ready and before placing it in the venue, you should turn it off. You don’t want the spectators in the venue to see the notifications, do you?
In some cases, there is no internet in the venue. Maybe there was and maybe there wasn’t, but currently there is no.
So, you’re being told that the content on the screen is not being updated, even though you updated the playlist in the online Studio.
The best thing will be to use the monitoring & reports tool (https://reports.novisign.com) to check and see if the device is still reporting to the server. If you see that the last update time (the right-most column in the player monitor) is not updated, that means there is not live internet at that device (in case the device is still playing).
You can also open a browser on that device (if it’s a remote device, you can ask someone in the venue to do that) and try to surf in the internet.
In that case, it’s not the app’s problem, but no internet problem and you should make sure that the internet there will be restored.
