GETTING STARTED WITH DIGITAL SIGNAGE

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1 2013 GETTING STARTED WITH DIGITAL SIGNAGE CE Labs, Inc. Let CE Labs show you how easy digital signage can really be and how it can assist you in achieving a greater ROI. Mike Kaylor CE Labs, Inc. 5/15/2013

2 Digital Signage WHY DO I NEED DIGITAL SIGNAGE Why do you need digital signage in your business? Digital signage can assist customers in making wise purchase decisions and drive sales. In this day and age businesses are concerned with their e-commerce online. Their focusing most of their attention on the web and neglecting their brick-and mortar store fronts. It s being reported that by the year 2016 at least 91% of all retail sales will still be from a brickand mortar store front. If Internet Sales Tax legislation passes, this will only continue to push consumers back into the local establishments. Brands are trying to figure we best way to spend their advertising dollars to get their sales message across, whether it is in radio, television, print ads, or in-store advertising. With digital signage you can take those television and print ads and reintroduce them to the customer right at the product shelf. CE LABS, Inc Page 1

3 WHERE TO START CHOOSING YOUR DIGITAL SIGNAGE MEDIA PLAYER One of the first things you need to decide is what player best fits your needs. CE Labs offers many players, all with different capabilities. For the sake of this document, we re going to simplify things down to the 5 major player options: Networkable or Stand-Alone Player, with or without GPIO (Push Buttons) capabilities and All in One. NETWORK-READY vs. STAND-ALONE Network-Ready means that players are attached to an Ethernet network and can be controlled by either a PC running QuickSign Pro or a Server running CCM Enterprise. Network-Ready media players are most often used in environments where there will be multiple players with different content that need to be updated frequently and/or are spaced far apart. Stand-Alone players do not have any type of network connections. Files must be copied from the PC to the media card. Then the media card would have to be walked over and manually inserted into the player. Stand-Alone players offer no reporting, logging or scheduling capabilities. These are excellent for use in single displays (counter, shelf etc.) that won t need to be updated too often. GPIO (Push Buttons) GIOP Push Buttons are several buttons (depending on the player) attached to the player. They allow the player to be programmable and interactive. The player runs a loop clip and then when one of the buttons is depressed, an associated video clip will play, then the unit will return to playing the loop clip once that video clip has finished. CE LABS, Inc Page 2

4 DELIVERING CONTENT After determining what player best suits our application, we need to be concerned with what type of content delivery system best fits. STAND-ALONE PLAYERS Stand-alone players simply play videos or images. They have no software to control them and you must remove the media card from the player and place it in a PC, in order to add new content to the player. These types of players use SD cards and USB pen drives. NOTE: SD cards should be a high quality, name brand, and must be CLASS 6 or above and preferably CLASS 10. This holds true for stand-alone as well as networkable media players. NETWORK PLAYERS QUCKSIGN PRO QuickSign Pro is a Windows only piece of software, free of charge, to manage your players over a local area network within a single subnet. If you need to manage players across multiple subnets or over the Internet, then you should be looking into CCM Enterprise. QuickSign Pro is a media manager that allows you to send videos, images, playlist, templates, and simple schedules to the player. It ll allow you to configure the hardware and do updates to the players. While it is not a content creation tool, it will allow you to build templates, and layouts, combining images, videos, RSS feeds, and weather information on the same screen. CE LABS, Inc Page 3

5 QuickSign Pro will allow you to manage multiple players at a single time. It is not intended to be an enterprise solution. One of the great things about QuickSign Pro is you don t need to know the IP address of the player. Upon startup, it will search your network for players. When players are found, they are populated into QuickSign Pro. QuickSign Pro has no manual. Everything you need to know is built into the extensive help system. QuickSign Pro has the ability to publish your playlist and media to a SD card or USB pen drive so they can be manually load the player without the use of a network. NOTE: When downloading QuickSign Pro. Make sure you have the correct version for the player you are trying to control. Quick Sign for HD300ZX Quick Sign 400 Quick Sign Pro 500EX Quick Sign Pro 7XX CE LABS, Inc Page 4

6 CCM ENTERPRISE CCM Enterprise is a solution designed to allow control of many players in different locations around the world. The system uses what is called a Call Home System. What this means is the players call the server at predefined time intervals in the same way a PC would call up a website. Therefore under normal conditions you would not need to do any modifications to your firewall configuration. If you sell advertisements on your players, CCM Enterprise will allow you to log when an ad was played. This allows for reporting to your customer how many times an ad ran in a given time period. Players can be setup in groups, allowing for simple management of a large number of players at single time. CCM Enterprise is truly an enterprise solution capable of managing a vast amount of players on a global scale. CE LABS, Inc Page 5

7 A good example of using GPIO buttons: Main Loop : Car Video Button 1 : Drive Train Button 2 : Interior Button 3 : Exterior Button 4 : Accessories Button 5 : Well you get the idea. ALL IN ONE The All in One digital signage media players like the AIO- 710 are a touch screen user interface device. They re capable of displaying video and / or HTML elements on the internal LCD screen. With the HDMI output, the AIO- 710 is designed to drive an external monitor with additional video and images with simultaneous HTML on the internal LCD. They allow for the ultimate in programmability and interactive customer experience. They re networkable and are fully compatible with QuickSign Pro and CCM Enterprise. If you have any question about our players or your current project, please call our sells department and let us assist in designing a solution for you. SIMPLE CONTENT CREATION Once you ve decided on which player fits your needs then we can move to creating content to play on that player. Creating good looking content doesn t have to be expensive nor does it have to be hired out. Sure, professionally created content will always look better but with today s tools, making decent content for your digital signage is simply a click away. CREATING VIDEO CONTENT Creating Video Content for your digital signage player can be simpler than you think. Here are some ways to create content for your digital signage project. Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 or above, is one of the absolute simplest ways to get started in creating content. With all the animations, wipes, and fades built into PowerPoint, you can make really nice content to play on your digital signage media player. The key is to save your work as a.wvm video file. CE Labs also offers several Microsoft PowerPoint Templates. Please check the website for more information. CE LABS, Inc Page 6

8 SAVING POWERPOINT SLIDES AS A VIDEO Under the Design Tab in PowerPoint 2010 includes page setups for 16:9 video screens sizes. You will want to select this to ensure your output fits your widescreen properly. With PowerPoint 2010 and above you can now save in.wmv video format. This cuts out having to purchase a conversion program and saves a step in the process. CE LABS, Inc Page 7

9 If you own an older version of PowerPoint, there are converters on the Internet that can convert your PowerPoint to a supported video format. NOTE: CE Labs, digital signage media players do not natively support Microsoft PowerPoint.ppt format. Just do the SAVE AS and save your PowerPoint as a video. Microsoft Movie Maker is also a great tool that is included with Windows to edit and put together video clips and still images. imovie for Mac users can be used in much of the same way as Microsoft Movie Maker. You would need to transcode the.mov file to a supported format such as.mpg,.wmv, or.mp4. Plus there are many more video editors to choose from. NOTE: CE Labs also has a talented staff of artist that can create professional content for your business. CE LABS, Inc Page 8

10 IMAGES Displaying images (.gif,.jpg,.png) on your digital signage media player can be a great way to get your point across. You need to be aware that the images must be sized appropriately to fit on the screen. Selecting an image that s very small with not much resolution can be displayed on your digital signage player but won t look very good on your monitor and will often be blurry and grainy. Just because it looks good on a PC monitor doesn t necessarily mean that it ll look good on a large high definition monitor. Multi-mega pixel cameras of today can shoot images several times larger than even your high definition monitor can display. If the images are not resized properly, it can take the player several seconds for these images to load. Remember to resize your images to their usage size for faster loaded. Recommended Free/Shareware software to resize your images includes: Microsoft Paint (Comes with Microsoft Windows) Format Factory (Win) Paint.Net (Win) Gimp (Win, Mac, Linux) One of the better ways to display images on the digital signage media player is to turn your stills into a video clip. This way you can put wipes, fades, and animation in between your images to make your content more professional looking. Note: There s a good chance you may have print ads or other print materials you could scan in and repurpose as images. CE LABS, Inc Page 9

11 VIDEO TRANSCODING What exactly is Video Transcoding and why do I need to be concerned with it? Video transcoding is the process of converting digital video files from one format to another. All of the videos we watch on our computers, tablets, mobile phones, set-top boxes and yes, our digital media players must go through a transcoding process to convert the original source video to be viewable on these devices. Why? Because different devices and browsers support different video formats. This process is called transcoding, reencoding, and video conversion. Transcoding video for your digital signage presentation can be pretty overwhelming. If you ve never done transcoding before, there are tutorials are all over the web, but most are not focused on creating video content for digital signage. Video transcoding is not simple. There are a lot of transcoding options available. Finding what works best for your player requires some understanding of those options and understanding of what formats and specification your player will accept. Recommended Free/Shareware software to re-encode your videos includes: Format Factory (Win) Handbrake (H.264) (Win, Mac, Linux) Video settings you re going to want to take notice of: Video Format: MPEG-2, MPEG4, H.264, WMV Megabits per Second: Listed in peak Mbps. These settings can vary somewhat depending on the model of video player you choose. If you re not sure of your settings, always refer back to your player s specifications for details. CE LABS, Inc Page 10

12 OTHER TYPES OF CONTENT RSS FEEDS RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. Some examples of what can be put in the "RSS Feed URL" field within QuickSign Pro: RSS FEEDS may be free for home use but not free in a commercial environment. Please check with the feed provider prior to using their RSS feeds for legality. The feeds listed above are used for examples only. WEATHER FEED CELabs currently offers weather feeds for use with our digital signage players. It s supports most major cities in the US only. Place the following string in your QuickSign Pro or CCM Enterprise template in the weather zone and replace the information with your location. If your weather isn t working for your location, try a larger metropolitan city in your area. Weather Example Simply replace the following: zip= zipcode city = your city st = state NOTE: RSS and Weather Feeds require a network media player. CE LABS, Inc Page 11

13 INSTALLATION A lot of times just a digital signage media player and a monitor aren t enough. Maybe you need to drive a TV wall, or a wall of televisions, or need to extend your cable. CE Labs has you covered for any need you may have. CE Labs is much more than JUST a digital signage company. We have a full line of Pro Audio Visual products to marry with your digital signage media players to fulfill whatever your requirements may be. With our engineering staff and art department, we can handle any custom project. Give us a call and tell us your requirements. Let us design an off the shelf or custom solution that best fits your needs. WHAT SETS CE LABS APART Leader in manufacturing Pro-AV equipment for over 25 years. 24 Hour tech support in the USA Large engineering staff capable of custom design to build projects US Owned and Operated! Our customer base ranges from the single person to the largest big box houses in the world. We do business globally Our products are built for 24/7 365 operation without downtime. We can create your content with a full content development department in house CE LABS, Inc Page 12