Other Legacy FAQs (Software)

The BrightSign Network (BSN) is an affordable subscription-based content hosting and distribution service, to serve your digital signage network. It makes delivering remote content to one or many units easy and frees you from the complexities of hosting and maintaining your own network. It offers strong, reliable security using standard web technologies, and can support any size of network. It also includes the BrightAuthor PC software application, which lets you monitor your network health and create, schedule, and distribute presentations.

The WebUI

The BSN offers a browser-based interface that allows you to schedule presentations and manage players from anywhere with an Internet connection. You can use the WebUI to do the following: 

• Upload image, audio, video files to the BSN Library.

• Create and publish simple looping presentations with images, video, and audio.

• Create Dynamic Playlists, Live Media feeds, and Live Data feeds.

• Organize players into customizable groups.

• Schedule presentations for groups of players.

• Add customizable tags to content files and players.

• Use tags to generate filtered playlists.

• Monitor the health of players connected to the BrightSign Network.

• Send reboot, recovery, and upload log commands to networked players.

• Monitor the statuses of networked players: This includes the current active presentation, total network traffic, and device error logs.

• Generate various playback logs (Event, State, Diagnostic, Playback) to keep records of player and presentation activity.

• View the subscription status of players.

• Add purchased subscriptions to players. You can also choose to have the BrightSign Network automatically manage your purchased subscriptions (which is the default setting).

BrightPlates (End-of-life Jun 9, 2022)

BrightPlates is a browser-based service that allows you to quickly and easily craft professional digital signs using HTML5 templates. You can select from our collection of default templates, build your own from scratch, or connect with content partners to craft your own look. After crafting your sign, it only takes a few clicks to distribute it to networked players and send instantaneous updates.

If you cannot use BSN.cloud or BrightAuthor:connected, here are some workarounds to publish to a BrightSign player using a Mac:

• A growing number of third-party CMS partners support using BrightSign players with their systems.  Some of them may have Mac OS clients. See Partners

• BrightAuthor can be run on Intel-based Macs using Windows emulation software like Parallels. 

  • Macs running Apple silicon (e.g., M1, M2, etc.) can emulate Windows ARM but not Windows x86 (Intel/AMD). BrightAuthor is a Windows x86 application and thus cannot be emulated on Macs running Apple silicon. 

  • For Parallels, and possibly other Virtual Machine software, it is best to use Bridged Networking mode which puts the Windows virtual machine on the same network as the host, just like if it was a real computer. See this article about networking modes in Parallels for more information: http://kb.parallels.com/en/4948

• If you are using the player for simple full screen playback without network updates, you can display looping content on the player by simply copying content to the flash card and powering up the unit with that card. No playlist file is required. The files will play back alphabetically as a looping playlist. Ensure that the content types are supported and the proper extensions are used.

• You can perform many operations from the BrightSign Network WebUI (an account is required). Player setup can now be performed directly from the WebUI. You can also use the WebUI to create full screen, non-interactive playlists and publish them to your networked player(s). See the BrightSign Network product page and  BSN WebUI User Guide for more information. 

• You can create a script file using any plain text editor and copy that script along with your content to the flash card. Scripts allow greater control of playback, including Interactive playlists.

• BrightSign players support legacy playlist (autoplay.bsp) and Interactive playlist (autoplay.csv) formats. These can be edited with any plain text editor.

The BrightAuthor 4.6.0.5/8/14/15 installer may fail if Windows Firewall is disabled. To fix this issue, enable Windows Firewall before installation. Once the installation process is complete, you can disable it again.

Publishing may fail if you use a card for Local File Networking and then use it for Local Storage. To fix, clear the flashcard and publish, or create setup files again.

1. Verify that the playlist and your content are in the root of the flash card.

2. Verify the playlist file is named "Autoplay.bsp".

3. For the HD2000, also verify you have the correct version of the autorun script in the root of the flash card. The latest is 2.0.43, which requires 2.x software. If you are using firmware version 1.3.x, you need autorun version 1.3.07. The HD600 Requires autorun 1.2.7.

This is most likely caused by improper formatting of the playlist. Playlists must be plaintext files.

1. Use TextEdit (or other plaintext editing application) to edit and save your playlists.

2. Open TextEdit preferences, and choose "plain text" as the default format.

3. Go to the Open & Save tab, an choose "Western (Windows Latin 1)".

If the demo files play, then the problem could be with your files, not the playlist. Normally, if files don't play at all, there's a problem with the content format.

1. Remove any non-alpha numeric characters from your file names. For example, the "+" is not acceptable in a file name.

2. Verify that every file used in interactive playlist is listed in the STATE column.

3. Verify that a file is not listed twice in the STATE column. If you need to list a file twice in the STATE column, then create a duplicate of that file with a different name.

4. Check the spelling of filenames in the .csv file to ensure that they match the actual filenames exactly.

5. For any input you accept, verify that the same event isn't listed twice on the EVENTS row. For example, you can use "button:1" and "button:2", but you can't use "button:2" and "button:2".

Note: Some users have reported problems creating interactive playlists with OpenOffice. Please try Excel or Google Spreadsheet instead.

The interactive playlist will ignore any events (input) that are not clearly defined. If your interactive playlist fails when you provide input, there's a problem with the file that's supposed to play when that button is pressed or the mouse is used.

1. Open the Autoplay.csv file and verify that the file that's supposed to play is also listed in the STATE column.

2. Check the spelling of the file name.

3. BrightSign players require a comma-separated CSV file (with periods used as the decimal separator). If you’re outside the United States, check the regional settings in Excel and make sure the list separator is a comma and the decimal separator is a period.

4. Verify that the interactive playlist and your content are in the root of the flash card.

5. Verify that the interactive playlist is named "Autoplay.csv"

6. For the HD2000, also verify you have the correct version of the autorun script in the root of the flash card. The latest is 2.0.43, which requires 2.x software. If you are using firmware version 1.3.x, you need autorun version 1.3.07.

7. Download a Brightsign interactive demo from Demos  and confirm it plays.

You can rotate MOV & MP4 videos easily with Quicktime Pro.

1. Open the video you wish to rotate.

2. Click the Window Menu and select Show Movie Properties.

3. Select the Video Track.

4. Choose Visual Settings.

5. Rotate the video.

6. Save or export the video as h.264.

If you see the error, "access to the path 'Content' is denied.", then you need to update your BrightAuthor software. This error only occurs with BrightAuthor releases older than 2.0.0.42. Please download the latest BrightAuthor from the Downloads page.

There is a known issue with BrightAuthor 2.3.0.57 where occasionally BrightAuthor stops responding if it’s unable to discover a player that is set up to use Local File Networking. This can happen when you either go to the Publish > Local File Networking tab or when you go to the Manage > Local File Network tab.

• Try quitting and reopening BrightAuthor.

• If the player is no longer listed, you can add it manually by clicking the Add button in the Publish > Local File Networking tab or the Manage > Local File Network tab.

• Try manually assigning the IP address of the player during the Unit Setup process and uninstalling all instances of Bonjour on your PC. You can then add the BrightSign manually using its IP address

In this method, each player plays a file that is a single part of the wall. You will need to partition the original video file before playback: For example, if you have two screens, then you would split the video into two equal-sized clips.

Here are the factors that can affect synchronization.

You will need to create a master BrightAuthor project, as well as a slave project for each other piece of the video wall. The master unit sends a signal each time it plays a video to keep the other in sync. The attached PDF file contains step-by-step setup instructions.

This video shows the 2011 Digital Signage Expo entry arch. The entry way contains 19 52" displays mounted in landscape and portrait controlled by one master unit and 18 slave units. As you can see, the 19 videos are played in sync.

• Multi_Player_Sync_Instructions.pdf (1 MB)

Here are a couple of things to do when you are designing HTML5 for portrait for publish from BrightAuthor (BA):

1. In your web-authoring software (i.e. Dreamweaver), make sure you set your page up for 1080 x 1920 (the reverse of landscape 1920x1080)

2. If you publish this as is, the page will not display correctly when outputted using BA in portrait mode. To get it to display correctly, you need to rotate the WHOLE page in Dreamweaver. This will not affect the authoring in Dreamweaver – it will look just the same but when you preview it will rotate. To get this rotate to happen, you need to encapsulate the whole body in a <div> </div>  region.

Step 1: Author the page in 90 degree rotation (1080 x 1920)

Step 2: Encapsulate all your body content between <div> </div> tags

Step 3: Within the <style> </style> tags, add a WebKit 90 degree rotation call.

Note: You can use other angles: 270, -90, etc. However, video will not work with these angels. You will also need to align the div to top and left “0”.

Step 4: In BrightAuthor, create a new presentation and set the Monitor orientation to Portrait. Then add your .html file using an HTML state.

Note: Use BrightAuthor 4.3.0.x or later when setting the Monitor orientation to Portrait. Earlier versions of BrightAuthor may cause undesirable scaling in HTML pages when set to portrait mode.

Note: #mainbodystuff shouldn't have any spaces. For example, using "# mainbodystuff" will fail to rotate content.