BrightAuthor General FAQ

The Groups tab of BSN and the Manage tab in BrightAuthor show the following status colors:

• Green: The player has a presentation scheduled and has successfully communicated with BSN within a certain time period. You can customize how frequently the player connects to BSN:

  1. In BrightAuthor, go to the Manage > Status tab

  2. Right-click a player, and select Edit. 

  3. Under the Networked with BrightSign Network option, use the Content Check Frequency drop down menu to indicate how often you want the player to connect to the server.

• Yellow: The player has missed its last scheduled update. For example, if you set the player to update every 5 minutes, and it has been 6 minutes since the player last checked in for an update, then the color will have changed to yellow.

• Red can indicate a number of errors:

  • Connectivity: The unit has missed multiple update cycles. For example, the player is set to update every 5 minutes and it has not connected with BSN for 11 minutes.

  • Scheduling (Applies only to BrightAuthor versions 3.4 and earlier): No presentations are scheduled for the player. For example, if you have set up a unit, but have not assigned a presentation to it yet, then the color will be set to red.

  • Downloads errors: Either the player cannot download the current sync file, which is downloaded each time it checks in with BSN (you can see this by viewing the Error log in the Info window), or the player failed to download one or more files in a recently published presentation. You can see the download status of each file listed in the Download Progress window. Go to Manage > Status and right-click on a player name to access either the Info or Download window.

  • Errors: The system has crashed due to a script error, or attempts to write to the SD card have failed because the card is malfunctioning or is locked. You can see these errors by viewing the Error log in the Info window.

  • Subscription: The subscription for the player’s serial number has expired, and the unit has been suspended.  You can see the subscription status by clicking on the properties of a player.

The View Mode option in BrightAuthor allows you to determine how videos will be scaled to fit in a Video Only or Video or Images zone. This option has no effect if the video and the zone are the same size.

In regular BrightWall presentations, the View mode option applies to videos on individual screens the same as described above. In stretched presentations, the View mode option applies to the entire wall. The following descriptions apply to stretched presentations only:

• Scale to Fill: The video will be stretched over all screens in the video wall. If the aspect ratio of the video wall does not match the ratio of the video content, the video will likely appear stretched or distorted.

• Letterboxed and Centered: The video will not be stretched. Instead, it will appear at the center of the video wall at its original resolution, which may cover one or multiple screens. Areas of the video wall that are not filled by the video will display the background color of the presentation.

• Fill Screen and Centered: The video will be stretched to fit the height or width of the video wall (whichever length is lesser). If the aspect ratio of the video wall does not match the ratio of the video content, the video will be cropped.

When you created your BrightAuthor presentation, you chose the target player model for the presentation. If you select a player model that doesn't support a certain interactive input, then that interactive event will be unavailable (it will be greyed out in the playlist tool bar and will not appear in the events tab) when you switch to an interactive playlist.

Make sure to select the correct player model to see all available interactive options. 

If you are using the BrightSign Network, and you enabled the Upload Logs feature during device setup, then each log file is deleted as soon as it is successfully uploaded to your BrightSign network account. If you are not using BrightSign Network, logs are stored for 10 days for BrightAuthor version 4.6 and earlier, and 30 days for BrightAuthor version 4.7 or newer.

There are several ways to display 4K images in BrightAuthor versions 4.3.0.x and later:

• Add the image to a Background Image zone

• Use the 4K Image Plugin.

• Add the 4K images to a Data Feed and select Support 4K Images.

Displaying a 4K image will consume the 4K video decoder on the player, so you won't be able to display both a 4K image and a 4K video at the same time. Some newer player models support Full Resolution Graphics in certain output modes, which allows for display of images larger than 1920x1080 without consuming a 4K video decoder.

You should keep your autorun updated to take advantage of any improvements that are made. To update the autorun version of a BrightSign (BSN) group or groups through BrightAuthor:

1. Ensure that the latest BrightAuthor is installed.

2. Go to Tools > Advanced in BrightAuthor

3. Select the Update Autorun tab in the Advanced Tools window

4. Check the boxes next to groups you would like to update and select Update now.

You can set when a player calls in for updates using either the BrightSign Network or Simple File Networking publishing methods. The update interval can be as short as five minutes, or as long as 24 hours.

The update interval is specified during the Unit Setup process. To change the interval, use the Content Check Frequency dropdown menu:

The Networked Variable feature in BrightAuthor requires an .xml file to update. The .xml file uses a simple RSS <item> tag. The <title> tag contains the variable name, and the <description> tag contains the variable value:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
	<channel>
		<item>
			<title>test</title>
			<description>50</description>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

In the example below, under File > Presentation Properties > Variables, the variable is pointing to an .xml file in a Dropbox account. When you select Validate, BrightAuthor attempts to read the value in the description field of the .xml tag.  

BSN Live Data Feeds

If you have a BrightSign Network subscription, you can use the Live Data Feed feature to update Networked Variables. With Live Data Feeds, each Title field specifies a variable name, and the corresponding Value field specifies the value of the variable.

To speed up the response process, first update the BOS and BrightAuthor version to the latest production version on the Downloads page. You should also design your presentation with the newest BrightAuthor version. Other tips to avoid lags include:

Images

• Smaller images open faster than large ones. If your images are larger than the output resolution, they will open slowly or not at all. You should size all images to the resolution of the zone they are going to be played in.

• Bitmaps images (BMP) open faster than other image types. The fastest image decode is achieved with an 8bit, RLE encoded bitmap. You can convert JPEG images to BMP using image editing software. 

• You can use the Image Cache feature in BrightAuthor (File > Presentation properties > Image Cache) to preload some images into memory so that they open much faster. You can use up to 16MB of graphics memory for the Image Cache. BrightAuthor shows how much memory each image will use when it’s opened. If an image is compressed (i.e. with the JPEG or PNG format), then it will consume more of the graphics memory than its reported file size. For example, a 100kB JPEG image might use up 4MB of memory when decompressed. Since bitmap images are not compressed, the file size of a bitmap image will always represent exactly how much memory it will use.

• Since videos open faster than images, you can use one of two provided batch programs (batch program 1, batch program 2), which convert images automatically to videos, and then change your presentation to use those videos instead of images. These batch files will convert any JPEG images in the folder into 10 second videos. Just copy JPEG images to the folder (not in subdirectory) of the BAT file, and then run the BAT file. The JPEG image filenames can't contain spaces. You can still use a timeout event in BrightAuthor to indicate how long you want the files to play.      

Videos

• H.264 MOV videos open faster than other video formats. For HDx10 models, transport streams (H.264 or MPEG-2) are the fastest kind of video formats.

• Video files with no audio will open faster than ones with audio. Sometimes, even though there's no audio in the file, the encoder still includes an empty audio layer.

Touchscreen/Button Press

Usually, what seems to be slow touch or button responses are caused by slow images. In these cases, we recommend using videos instead. See the last bullet under “Images” for information about converting images to video.

BrightAuthor communicates with the player using HTTP port 8080.

The Bonjour protocol is used for discovery on TCP port 5354 and UDP port 5353. Bonjour is not used when you add the unit manually using its IP address.

Note: Port 8008 is used for the variables page.