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Programming Guide Inspired Signage XPress IS-SPX-1000/1300 Inspired Signage Last Revised: 11/20/2013
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AMX DOMESTIC CHANNEL PARTNER and END CUSTOMER LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER AND LICENSE (Excerpt from CHANNEL PARTNER TERMS AND CONDITIONS Versions 11.17.2011 with updates for previous version 8.25.2010 [sections 6.1 (a), (b) and (f)]) Definitions “End Customer” means an authorized end customer with direct in warranty privileges from AMX. Within this limited warranty, disclaimer and license document, “End Customer” shall have the same meaning as “Channel Partner” with the noted exceptions of Sections 6.
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Table of Contents Table of Contents Inspired Signage XPress Programming ...............................................................1 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1 What Can You Do With XPress? ...................................................................................... 1 When to use XPress Authoring Features? ....................................................................... 1 Installation ...
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Table of Contents news_ticker.svg ............................................................................................................. 19 news_crawler.svg .......................................................................................................... 19 Using Format Helpers ............................................................................................. 20 bouncing_text.svg ....................................................................................................
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Table of Contents Remote Control of Playback ................................................................................... 39 When To Use Remote Control of Playback.................................................................... 39 How To Use Remote Control of Playback...................................................................... 39 Interactive Pause/Resume Over TCP ............................................................................. 40 Interactive Pause/Resume Using HTTP GET ...
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Table of Contents Additional Syntax for Multiscreen Content ................................................................... 57 Extension of the SVG Element ....................................................................... 57 Extension of JavaScript ................................................................................................. 58 Example: Screen Layout With Six Screens .....................................................................
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Table of Contents Serial Protocol File Editor .................................................................................81 Overview ................................................................................................................ 81 Adding a List Variable............................................................................................. 81 Adding a Range Variable ........................................................................................
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Table of Contents vi Inspired XPress - Programming Guide
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Inspired Signage XPress Programming Introduction The Inspired Signage XPress media content developer (referred to hereafter as “XPress”) allows users of the IS-SPX-1000 and IS-SPX-1300 IS-SPX Players to manage media elements in a digital signage application. Its purpose is to combine and customize media elements created in different applications in order to build digital signage content of professional quality.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Minimum Recommended PC Requirements IS-XPress will operate on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit) PCs that support of DirectX 9.0c and SSE2 instructions. For best performance, AMX recommends a minimum of a Pentium D processor with separate graphics card. IS-XPress may operate on older PC platforms, but less responsively. Also, please note that other software applications can also degrade the responsiveness of IS-XPress.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Installation Location When installed, XPress is accessible from the Windows Start menu in the Programs/AMX Control Disc directory, and this directory will be created if it does not already exist. Open the Inspired Signage directory (FIG. 3) to run XPress. FIG. 3 AMX Control Disk directory with XPress XPress Removal If XPress needs to be removed from a computer for any reason, it must be removed via the Uninstall AMX products utility.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming XPress Main Interface Time Settings: The Time Settings controls set the date and time at which a project will run. Click the Lock icon to lock the time to the internal clock in the IS-SPX Player. Animation Controls: The Animation Controls determine the direction in which an animation test will run. Click the Play button to run a project and the Pause button to stop it: the Restart button will return the project to its beginning in either Play or Pause mode.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming FIG. 5 My Projects folder The notion of a project as introduced by XPress has several advantages. In particular: The user can create projects offline, preview them and keep modifying them without affecting the actual presentations displayed by an IS-SPX Player. When the project is finalized, it is easy to publish it on the target device. The user can apply conventional backup systems on the My Projects folder to reduce the risk of losing data.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming FIG. 8 New Project dialog - Target 5. Click OK to create the new project folder. Browsing Panel The browsing panel provides a few basic file operations through a pop-up menu that appears when right-clicking your mouse.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming FIG. 9 Set Type menu Changing the type of a Collection modifies the behavior of XPress when opening the Collection. The browsing panel allows the user to copy files and folders with intuitive drag and drop operations. For example copying a file from its position to a new destination can be done as follows: 1. Open a browsing view where your original file is located.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Importing PowerPoint Presentations While the IS-SPX Player doesn't support direct display of PowerPoint presentations (PPT). it does provide import functionality for a PPT, so that when a PPT is imported into an XPress project, it is immediately converted to video (without audio). Microsoft Office 2010 is not used by the import mechanism. If you have pre-installed Microsoft Office 2010 then you must manually install PowerPoint viewer 2007.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Other templates will be provided in future releases of XPress. For more information, please refer to the Adding Additional Templates to Inspired Signage XPress on page 100. To create a new SVG document based on one of these templates, simply copy (or drag and drop) the one you have selected from the My Templates collection to your target project.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Edit a Media Property The Media property allows you to control the display properties of the media linked to the current document. This property is used by many templates, i.e. multi-layers and playlists. The media property shows the following information to the user: The media URL. (e.g. video.avi or the absolute URL) If the media is located in the same project as the document, the URL is relative. The media type. (e.g.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming By default the following parameters are not shown. To make them visible, expand the More... item. • Lock mouse editing: When selected the interactive editing for this media is disabled. • Mime type: The media type. This should be detected correctly by XPress and should not need to be modified. • Preserve aspect ratio check box: Controls if the aspect ratio of the media should be preserved when included into the master document.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Editing Media Elements Layout Media elements can be declared as transformable in SVG templates. If a media is transformable, then its layout can be edited directly in the preview area. Such elements appear in the preview panel highlighted by a black and yellow border. Simply move your mouse cursor on a media element to check if it can be transformed. FIG.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming The right-click on an element opens a popup menu with the following shortcuts: Full Screen: Zooms the element so that it occupies the entire document. Rotate Right: Rotates the element by 90 degree clockwise. Rotate Left: Rotates the element by 90 degree counter-clockwise. Flip Vertical: Flips the element upside-down. Flip Horizontal: Flips the element left-right. Reset Transform: Removes all zoom, rotation and skew on the element.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Multi-Layered SVG Templates By default, each time you create a new SVG document by right-clicking the browsing panel, selecting New SVG, and choosing your aspect ratio, XPress creates a new file based on the multi-layer SVG template. The Multi-layer SVG template simplifies the task of composing a scene using XPress.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Default Position: position of the top-left corner of the new layer. By default the new layer is located at the top-left of the screen (0,0). Default Aspect Ratio: you can choose if you want a new layer to keep its aspect ratio (xMidYMid) or to be scaled (none) when inserted into the document. You can change the above parameters at any time.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Composing a playlist SVG document 1. Right-click in the browsing area and select New Playlist to create a new_playlist.svg file. You can rename it whatever you wish. 2. Open the newly created SVG file. In addition to the XML Tree and WebDAV tabs, the editing panel will open the Properties and the Playlist tabs. 3.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming In addition to the Properties tab, playlist SVG documents instruct XPress to open a Playlist tab in the editing panel. This tab lets you compose the playlist and the order in which media elements will be played. The following interactions are possible from the Playlist tab: Add a new media. You may use different ways to add a new media: Drag-and-drop any media to the Playlist tab of editing panel.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Special News Templates To simplify the creation of dynamic content, XPress is provided with a set of active templates that can be customized by the user and that perform specific actions. The active templates use JavaScript for dynamic creation of SVG documents with specific graphical layouts and up-to-date content. In this section, we discuss a number of active templates we have developed to retrieve RSS content. We call these templates news templates.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming 7. Customize the settings of your news source using the Properties tab. The Feed Type lets you select the type of your input data. The Feed Update Policy lets you control when the feeds should be updated. Additional settings can be found depending on the templates. 8. Save the final document. Customizing a News SVG Document All the templates SVG files provided in My Templates/News let you customize their layout using a different set of parameters: news.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Using Format Helpers The Format Helpers are a set of files which can be added as a multimedia layer in the news.svg and news_crawler.svg file to simplify the construction of the layout. To use the bouncing text or the fit text helper: 1. Drag and drop it on your document like any multimedia file. 2. Open it 3. Change the Text to [SPX][title] or [SPX][description] to display respectively the title or the description of your news. 4.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Scalable Content and Aspect Ratio of Your Display The IS-SPX Player natively supports the SVG graphic language. This language is scalable: that means that the graphics are rendered on the fly according to the resolution supported by the display. This guarantees a perfect rendering for texts and graphics, regardless of the resolution of the display.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming It may happen that the same content will be displayed on monitors with different aspect ratios. In this case the following will happen: If you use 16:9 templates, the content will be displayed using black borders on the top and bottom when shown on a 4:3 screen. FIG. 24 16:9 templates as shows on a 4:3 screen If you use 4:3 templates, the content will be displayed using black borders on the left and right when shown on a 16:9 screen. FIG.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming FIG. 27 Real Aspect 4:3 content fitted to a 4:3 display Note that in XPress, you may change the aspect ratio of the preview panel by sliding its horizontal and vertical dimensions. When previewing SVG content, XPress will do exactly as the IS-SPX Player will do on real displays with the same aspect ratios. Multimedia Effects Adding Effects The XPress software installation comes with a number of default media transition effects files.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming The Effect list allows you to remove or to customize effects. It is possible to modify the following parameters: Trigger: Select if the effect starts at the beginning or at the end of the media file. This parameter is automatically set by XPress when dropping an effect file unto a media element. Offset: The offset between the beginning/end of the media and the beginning of the effect.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming FIG. 31 Transparent background as shown on the IS-SPX Player Publishing To publish a project manually to a device, do the following: 1. Open My Devices in a first tab. Identify the IS-SPX Player on which you want to publish. For more information, please refer to the Monitoring on page 26. 2. Open My Projects in a second tab. 3. Drag and drop the project you want to copy to the device you want to update.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Monitoring XPress keeps a list of the devices available in the network using the My Devices folder in the workspace view. The My Device view allows you to: Monitor the devices connected to your network. Automatically scan devices connected to your network. Provide details on the status of each device. Open a device to browse its content. Manually add a device for monitoring.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Security: You can also directly add user names and passwords for protected devices. If you do not enter a password in this dialog, XPress will ask you to authenticate yourself when trying to publish content to a protected device. 4. The new device is added to the current folder. 5. Once added, you may change the name of the new device from the browsing panel at any time.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming 3. Drag and drop from the browsing panel of your XPress project any individual media you want to schedule into the calendar view in the Editing panel. Define the start duration of each media and its recurrence pattern, if desired. 4. Repeat the previous step for each media you want to schedule and save your changes. 5. Open the index.svg file of your XPress project. Drag and drop the new.ics file as a new layer into your index.svg file. 6. Save your changes.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Management Options Calendar Event Options Editing Zone FIG. 38 Calendar view Add Events To a Schedule To add an event to a schedule: 1. Open your schedule 2. Select the day or week view from the Management zone. 3. Drag and drop the media you want to schedule into the editing zone of your calendar. 4. A new event will be added where the media was dropped. 5.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming FIG. 39 Adding an event to the schedule Modify the Scheduling Properties of an Event You can edit the properties of an event using the Event zone (FIG. 40). FIG. 40 Scheduling properties of an event The following properties can be edited: • URL of the event: Link to the scheduled media. This is automatically modified when you drop any media on the event. • Summary: Title for this event.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Define Recurring Events Events can be scheduled as a single-time event or as a series of repeating events. By default, all new events are singletime events. To transform an event into a repeating event, you need to check the Repeat check box in the Event zone. By default, the event will repeat every day indefinitely. Depending on the version of XPress, it might be necessary to click the Pattern button and then the OK button to confirm this repetition.
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Inspired Signage XPress Programming Preview Scheduled Content XPress allows the user to preview scheduled content at a specific date or time. This is useful to validate in advance what will be displayed in the future. To preview scheduled content at a specific date or time, use the control on the top of the preview panel (FIG. 42). FIG. 42 Preview scheduled content It is possible to change the time and the date being displayed in XPress using either the clock or the calendar control.
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Remote Control Remote Control Overview The IS-SPX Player has powerful remote control capabilities. You can use the serial port or the IP connection to control the content source, control the playback of animations, video, or audio, and display messages or contextual animations on an external event. Three main methods can be used to control the IS-SPX Player: Network control. This may be done from a PC, a URL to the this player or from another IS-SPX Player. The serial port of the IS-SPX Player.
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Remote Control FIG. 43 Page ID table Next, associate the menu document with a variable name. This configuration is done in the Properties section of the XML Tree tab of the template (FIG. 44). FIG. 44 Properties section of the XML Tree tab Whenever the content of this variable is changed by a network or serial port command, the menu will switch to display the media with a matching ID. By default, the first content of the list is displayed.
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Remote Control FIG. 45 Playlist Finally, some values have predefined functions. By default, these are: NEXT: move to the next page PREVIOUS: move to the previous page PAUSE: pause playing interactively PLAY: resume playing after a pause You can change the names for those special values in the Interactive Controls property group in the Properties tab (FIG. 46). FIG. 46 Interactive Controls property group Triggering a Content Switch Over IP Modifying the media is done using shared variables.
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Remote Control If you do not have an IS-SPX Player at hand, you can still test the remote control protocol with content running in the XPress application on your PC. For this, check the Enable Network API box in the Settings menu (FIG. 47). FIG. 47 Settings menu - Enable Network API When enabling the network API via XPress, the TCP port number is also 1234. This assumes that the control variable is the default name (“menu”) and you want to switch the content to one with the ID equal to “P1”.
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Remote Control
Switching Content With the Serial Port To change the current media via the serial port, you need to do the following: Create a protocol file (.
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Remote Control FIG. 48 Key Identifiers tab In the example (FIG. 49), a mapping is made for the key codes sent by common USB remote controls used for PowerPoint presentations, while Ctrl+A trigger the alternate content of the sample. FIG.
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Remote Control FIG. 50 Controlling the value of the variable It is also possible to use JavaScript directly to control the value of the shared variables. The sample code below assumes that we want to control the content on 192.168.1.10 by clicking on a rectangle.
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Remote Control GET Embedded In an HTML Page The playback GET method can also be embedded in an HTML page. The example below will let you play and pause the media from a remote web page. You will need to make sure that the web page is stored on a 'trusted' web site. Otherwise, the security settings of many Web browsers might prevent you from using the XML HttpRequest().
