If you've spent any time shopping for digital signs for your small business, you might be a tad discouraged at the cost and complexity. But thanks to, you can enjoy a whole new generation of software, services, and devices that range from free to inexpensive, and that offer all kinds of great features.
Digital Signage Software Open Source
Amazingly flexible, digital signs can display simple images, slideshows, movies, Web pages, and dynamic content pulled in from the Internet, or whatever sources you want to use. Anything you can do on a computer you can put into digital signage. Android, the popular Linux variant, is slimmed-down for portable devices such as smartphones, tablets, gaming and media boxes, and desktops and laptops. It also makes a dandy lightweight, power-frugal platform for digital signs. You can stuff an entire Android operating system, plus your multimedia presentations, into a matchbox-sized case and run a big screen with it.
Linux is a mature general-purpose enterprise operating system hardened by two decades of development and use in the most demanding environments, from embedded devices, desktops, laptops, and small servers to mainframes and supercomputers. It's stable, secure, and adaptable. So which one is better? If you're looking for a digital sign system with software, hardware, and support, you'll find a lot of Android options. If you're more inclined to do-it-yourself, or have good tech people, then Linux offers a wider choice of software, and you can run it on pretty much any hardware. Digital signage is just a fancy term for your stuff on a screen—like schedules, commercials, product information, menus, catalogs, order forms, or anything you want. You can use just about any kind of display: televisions, ordinary computers and monitors, small form-factor hardware like the, digital photo screens, heavy-duty commercial-grade computer monitors, big outdoor screens, and big free-standing touch-screen kiosks.
Check out and to see what's available in the world of video screens. If you can connect a computer to it, you can make it display whatever you want. The Raspberry Pi is an amazing little single-board computer originally designed as an educational tool for children, but it's also a big hit with adults for its low price—starting around $30—and adaptability. Offers several worthy digital sign applications that run on the Raspberry Pi, including the super-easy Raspberry Picture Frame Slideshow. This product displays your images in a full-screen slideshow, and Web pages from a simple text list of URLs.
All you do is download and install the Raspberry Picture Frame Slideshow operating system to a USB stick, copy your images or URLs to the same USB stick, plug it into the Raspberry Pi and boot up. It runs in protected full-screen mode so nobody can mess with it. Raspberry Picture Frame Slideshow is free to download and use. If you like it, drop a few bucks in the company's PayPal account. Donations get you access to software with enhanced features. —a slick, sophisticated Web application—runs on your Linux, Mac, or Windows server.
It's a free download with no limitations—you get full functionality whether or not you feed the tip jar. Running Xibo requires a bit more tech savvy. For an average tech nerd it's easy to install and setup. Xibo, like most Web apps, has three components: the server, the administration interface, and the display clients. Currently the display client software runs on Windows, Ubuntu Linux, and Android. The Windows and Linux clients are free, while the Android client costs about $25 per client.
Not so tech-savvy? Xibo also offers a fast, reasonably-priced cloud platform—Xibo in the Cloud—which saves you the hassle of installing and managing software. Once Xibo's installed, you have the full power of your operating system and applications for designing and running your digital signs. You can make simple slideshows in your favorite slideshow app, run videos, use a content management system like Drupal or Wordpress for rich dynamic content—the sky's the limit.
Xibo comes with a batch of content-management tools such as schedulers, templates and layouts, tickers, transitions, and a user-management system for dividing up the work in a secure fashion. The company offers a range of digital signage products including the free MediaCloud, MediaPlayers, MediaServer, and MediaHybrid. MediaCloud provides everything you need to create and manage your content, plus decent analytics tools as well. You provide the Internet-connected screens to display your content. This Web application is pure software-as-a-service, so your content runs on any client platform: Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows. Digital Signage also offers three compact media players. Gogo loves english 1 pdf free download. The MediaDroidX runs Android and costs $165.
It supports HDMI and all Digital Signage software. MediaBox-200 and MediaBox-300 run Windows and cost $595 and $695, respectively. These include additional functionality such as networking and support for live TV. The digital signage market is just beginning to explode thanks to Android and Linux, small powerful hardware, and cloud services.
If you're interested in digital signage, as a customer or as a vendor, this is a great time to be in the business. Carla Schroder is the author of The Book of Audacity, Linux Cookbook, Linux Networking Cookbook, and hundreds of Linux how-to articles. She's the former managing editor of Linux Planet and Linux Today. Do you have a comment or question about this article or other small business topics in general? Speak out in the.
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From the creator of Instant WebKiosk/UB, Raspberry Picture Frame, WebXperience OS, Instant WebKiosk/EDS, Safe Internet for kids, Snowden Tribute, and Raspberry WebKiosk, we are proud to introduce Raspberry Digital Signage, an operating system designed for digital signage installations. A Raspberry Pi port of Instant WebKiosk/EDS It's is a Raspberry Pi port of the Instant WebKiosk/EDS (Easy Digital Signage) operating system designed to work only on PCs, engineered to run in full-screen mode (there is no way to escape this view but rebooting the Raspberry Pi). Offers multiple view modes and sub-views It can easily handle multimedia and web content, thanks to the two view modes built into the OS, Media View and Web View. While the first one lets users to view image files using a slideshow and playback video files and streams from the local network or over the Internet, the latter will display HTML pages. In addition, the Web View features the Mozilla Firefox experience, the Midori experience, and the Chromium/Google Chrome experience sub-views, each one offering a different web browsing experience.
Supports Raspberry Pi model B Raspberry Digital Signage was tested with Raspberry Pi model B (512MB of RAM) microcomputer, with both multimedia view (video player and image slideshow) and web view (HTML and HTML5 pages display). Getting started with Raspberry Digital Signage To use it, simply download the zip archive from the dedicated section (see above), extract the ISO image and write it to a SD card using the dd command-line utility on GNU/Linux and Mac OS X, and Win32DiskImager on Microsoft Windows. The developers recommend a SDHC Class 10 card of 2GB or bigger, that should be empty and formatted. Plug the SD card into the Raspberry Pi hardware and reboot it.
The system will automatically start, allowing users to establish a network connection, which will be remembered after a reboot. Bottom line All in all, Raspberry Digital Signage is a great WebKiosk operating system that can be used on outdoor advertising, public installations, marketing, exhibitions, placemaking, and wayfinding, using nothing but a Raspberry Pi portable device.
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