Specifications

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Enhancing your displays

4. Enhancing your displays

This section describes how to enhance your digital signs. This information applies equally to creating signs for a stand-

alone iCOMPEL, and to creating signs for a channel publisher.

Select a topic below for more information about:

Synchronizing Playlist displays between Zones

Automatic captioning

Using Advance to commands

Displaying Video-on-demand using a sub-playlist

Interactivity

Using the RS-232 port

Using General Purpose Input-Output (GPIO)

Using Touch screens

Displaying part of a Movie or Web site

Mitigating screen burn for Plasma screens

Setting the screen background

4.1 Synchronizing Playlist displays between Zones

It is possible to synchronize the display between two Playlists in different Zones. This can be used, for example, to display

video or images in one Zone and related text captions in another Zone.

The simple way to do this is by using Automatic captioning . A more complex and more powerful method is by using

Advance to commands .

4.1.1 Automatic captioning

To implement synchronization between two or more Zones you need to designate one Playlist as the Master (Primary)

Playlist, and one or more other Playlists as Slave (Secondary) Playlists. You add named targets into each Slave

Playlist, known as Rendezvous Points, and add an identically named command to the Master Playlist, known as an

Advance To command. When the Master Playlist reaches the Advance To command, the iCOMPEL forces all the

Slave Playlists to start playing the first item in the Playlist after the Rendezvous point.

Automatic captioning relies on two sets of files having corresponding file names, so that they are displayed together. For

example the video file named Marketing_Highlights_01.mpg and the text file named Marketing_Highlights_01.txt are

displayed at the same time.

To set up automatic captioning between a Zone with Video content (the Video Zone) and the corresponding Zone with text

content (the Text Zone) you need to follow separate steps as follows:

Setting up the Video Zone for automatic captioning

To set up a Video Zone for automatic captioning, follow these steps:

1. Put all the videos into one folder on the iCOMPEL.

2. Click on the video Zone to open its Playlist for editing.

3. Select the Files and Folders tab.

4. Click on the Add button alongside the name of the Folder with the videos to add it as a folder-play item.

5. Select the Playlist tab.

6. Click the Edit button for the folder.

7. For the Item Synchronization option, select Master.