howto: change xibo layout designer resolution

quite a few people have been asking how to increase the resolution or size of the layout designer in xibo, which has a default size of 800×450 (16:9 resolution. media is scaled to the correct res on your display).

the accepted way of changing the designer resolution is to go to Management > Resolutions from within the xibo web interface and edit the resolution that you want. when i tried this, for some reason, it did not work for me. an alternate way of changing the resolution is to edit the database which i will show you how to do below. i assume in this howto that you already have phpmyadmin installed and working.

one thing to note is that this method will only work for new layouts that you create, all pre-existing layouts will use the old 800×450 editor size. you can manually change the size on each of the old layouts, but if you do, then you’ll have to redo the position and size of your content again. i will not go over that part at this time, but can later if people show enough interest.

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howto: add media types in xibo

some people over at the xibo launchpad page have been asking how to use different media types, or audio/video/image extensions, with their digital signage setup. since this is a pretty easy task, i thought i’d give everyone a quick howto.

caveat: before i go into details, i should mention that you’ll need to test the default programs that xibo uses to show the files types that you are adding. for instance; if you are adding the ability to upload mp4 files using the windows client, you should first attempt to play the file with windows media player to ensure that you have the proper codecs installed and everything is working correctly. the same goes for ubuntu and the python client.

there are basically 2 ways to do this; through mysql’s command line interface or by using a tool like phpmyadmin. for simplicity, i’ll be showing you how to do this in phpmyadmin. (learn how to install it here)

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howto: enable plugins in ckeditor

although this will work for any plugin, this howto is geared towards enabling the tables plugin for ckeditor in Xibo. this will allow you to create tables in the text editor.

open a terminal and navigate to /path/to/webserver/xibo/3rdparty/ckeditor

cd /path/to/webserver/xibo/3rdparty/ckeditor

use nano or your favorite text editor to open config.js

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xibo alternative splash screens

i decided to create a few alternative splash screens for xibo.

to use one of these images as your splash screen for xibo, download the file you want and save it in /opt/xibo/pyclient/client/python/resources. then edit 0.xml in the resources folder and change the tag that says “splash.jpg” to the name of your new splash image (in this case splash1.png, splash2.png, or splash3.png). the last step is to remove 0.xml from /opt/xibo/pyclient/client/python/data and restart xibo to see your brand new splash screen.

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my xibo setup

i recently installed a xibo digital signage system at a local non-profit that i do side work for.

hardware: a Dell Optiplex 755 SFF. Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 @ 2.53GHz. 2GBs of RAM and a 120GB HDD.

software: Ubuntu 10.04.1. LAMP stack. Xibo Python Client

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howto: get local weather on xibo

if you want to display your local weather on your xibo open source digital signage layouts, then this is the guide for you.

My setup -

Software: Ubuntu 10.04, Xibo 1.2.0-rc2 server, Xibo 1.2.0-rc2 python client. the server is hosted on a vps at bluemile cloud (great prices). custom bash script to download xml file from noaa, place it into a directory on your website, and a cron job to run that script every hour

php and bash source: I am not going to go over the php or bash script, but you can download the files below and modify it to your needs. notes are in the files.

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