Specification Philips Tableaux e-paper

This article describes the features and working principle of the Grassfish Android Player on Philips BDL254050i e-paper devices.

You can find the manufactures product page at: https://www.ppds.com/display-solutions/digital-signage/philips-tableaux/25bdl4050i-00 

System requirements

This specification is valid from Android Player version 11.14.3.

Features

The Grassfish Android Player supports the following spot types and IXM Platform features on the e-paper device:

• All spot types

• Spot scheduling

• SSP

• DOOH

• Software updates

• Power save mode 

Standard Mode

In standard mode, you can display all spot types in a playlists sequence. The minimum spot playtime is two minutes. Spots with a shorter playtime are automatically extended to two minutes playtime. Note that the e-paper needs between 36 and 50 seconds to render the picture.

Behavior per spot type.

• Images (PNG, JPEG): playtime according to the duration is set in the playlist but at least two minutes are required.

• Videos (MP4 with h264 encoding): after three seconds of playback a snapshot is taken and sent to the display. The duration of the playout is the video duration but at least two minutes are required.

• HTML5 spots (Composer, ASC, Wizard): three seconds after the play command a snapshot is sent to the display. The duration of the playout is the spot duration but at least two minutes are required.

• Website spots: after 15 seconds of playtime a snapshot is taken and sent to the display. The duration of the playout is the spot duration but at least two minutes are required.

• PDF: only single page PDFs are supported. The duration of the playout is the spot duration but at least two minutes are required.

Example playlist

In this example, the playlist contains one image, a short video, a long video, a PDF, an HTML5 spot, and a website spot.

Durations in the playlist:

Durations on the e-paper device:

All other playlist features like scheduling spots and playlists or priorities are supported.

Power save mode

General description

The Grassfish Player software can switch off the built in Android Player while the display stays without power on the last rendered spot. After a configurable time, the Android Player is powered up again. It then checks if content validity has changed or if new content is available for download from the IXM Platform and executes the downloads for playlists, content, and updates as well as the required server communications.

Given the fact that the device is powered down and the player is not running, only one valid spot is displayed.

Power save mode configuration

You can configure the power save mode with the following two settings in the player configuration under ScreenController:

• Select EPD Power saving mode enabled to enable power save mode.

• Edit EPD wake-up interval (in minutes) to change the wake-up interval.

For example, if you set the wakeup interval to 180, the player will boot up every 180 minutes or earlier if there is another valid spot within the wakeup interval before the last shutdown. With this configuration, it’s possible to display less frequently changing content with almost no power consumption.

Use cases

• Menu boards for restaurants (breakfast, lunch, dinner, happy hour)

• Guides to different sessions during an exhibition

• Meeting agendas

• Welcoming visitors

• Special offers   

• Information on trains or in other vehicles 

• Product price tags with images and descriptions in car dealer shops

Working with scheduled spots

In this example, the playlist contains three spots with different validities.

To render the spot for the scheduled time, the device will power up no matter how long it was in the power save mode. It will render the content according to the playlist schedule. Before it shuts down, the player stores the start time of the next valid spots as the boot time if it’s within the power save interval.

Content creation

You can easily create content in the following ways:

• Use Grassfish IXM Platform features and create HTML Composer or ASC spots with templates.

• Display websites.

• Transform documents into PDFs or images.

Provisioning

Provisioning is easily done using the generic provisioning service or via the InitBox process as usual. For more information, check the respective documentation.

Product images

Attachment

You can find the "Philips Content Design Guide – Using Photoshop & Illustrator" in the following attachment.