Can I Run a webpage directly?

I have a webpage, which I would like to display on screen, is it possible?

Yes. That’s possible. You have two options:

Using the scheduled player

The scheduled player package can show web content. Import it, and create a new setup based on it. Then add a new page to a playlist:

You’ll get a new empty page. You can add other content here, but for web content, select Plugin, then the Browser plugin:

In the preview screen you can resize the browser content (by default it’s fullscreen). Below you see the settings. Enter a url that you want to show.

The fullscreen browser package

You can install this fullscreen browser package. Just follow the link and import it into your account. It starts a chromium in fullscreen mode and allows you to cycle through a list of urls:

Let me know if you have further questions.

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Thanks for your swift response. Much appreciated.

Is the scheduled player beta stable enough to use it in a important client project?

Yes. It’s pretty solid and the beta label will be removed soon. But there’s still ways you can configure that package in a way that ends up not working: For example by adding too many HD videos at once on a single page or using the normal video player for HD content.

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Great! Moving forward then!

(I used the normal player for HD and it was bad :smile: learned the lesson hehe)

Mind sharing the “was bad” part?

Of course! The videos stuttered a lot, it was like streaming video with bad bandwidth, then I saw the HD player component used that and it worked wonderfully!

Ah. I see. Yeah. The normal video player is using GL textures for playback. It’s more performance hungry and HD is close of over the limit of what’s possible. The normal player is great for certain use case like for example in the magic video wall where videos must be freely stretches/rotated/scaled. For normal usage, the HD video tile is a much better choice indeed as it more or less directly places the video on the screen without any additional GL step :slight_smile:

It seems I am not able to add a dynamic/animated webpage via the Browser plugin. Is there anyway to show dynamic/animated webpages in the Scheduled Player? I am seeing this warning message.

The requested Url is updated at most every minute. A static screenshot is created and shown, so you can’t show any kind of animated content. Your content must also be publicly reachable, so you can’t show content from your internal network.

I get that warning too, and I would like to show dynamic graphics with little intro animations (the pie graphic has a little animation) is there a way to show that?

The browser part of the scheduled player cannot show dynamic content. There’s no browser on the device itself.

The fullscreen browser would be a wonderful addition to the scheduled player package :slight_smile: But I totally get that this is a lot of work, maybe someday

Maybe, but I’m still not convinced that the browser is a good solution for digital signage in general. It seems so fragile: If there’s a network hiccup, parts of the page might not work and unless the site cooperates with the signage system somehow, it’s basically impossible to detect this automatically. And any kind of animation will probably be quite sluggish and look bad.

Maybe a Lottie package would be a great way to show dynamic graphics https://airbnb.io/lottie

Totally, the browser seems like the easiest way, but it’s always a very unstable path, but anyways (hehehe) could we add the Fullscreen browser as a child to the Scheduled Player?

I see what you mean and understood what your concern is, @infobeamer-fw. I was just thinking to show real time data using custom React page or very simple css3 animation to have image carousels(not full screen size).

Really need to have chromium available. We need to be able to display real-time data in an interface that makes use of our already existing workforce who is well versed in the standard UI dev stacks.

If the pi3 isn’t powerful enough for animation and normal UI frameworks, is the pi4?

This lack of option is the reason we’re having to consider brightsign for future work in spite of the fact that we don’t like it as much as info-beamer.

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Have you seen https://info-beamer.com/pkg/3617?

Last time I used it, it pulled from the URL every minute or so - has that changed?