To provide the real-time positioning maps on all screens, we installed an MC100 MediaCAT player on the bridge where it could be close to an external GPS antenna mounted on the mast. This bridge unit serves dynamic web pages to all other players on the ship, showing the current position, speed and bearing.

When Red Funnel first asked us if we could show the World Cup on the bar screens, we initially thought about running aerial cables to each of the bar area MediaCAT players and providing each one with a freeview tuner. Running cables on a ship is not easy at the best of times, but coping with the interference from all of the other equipment on board, with long cable runs is even harder, so we looked for a way of using the existing infrastructure to do the same job.

Since we already had a MediaCAT on the bridge, close to the mast where a TV aerial would be mounted, we decided to look into streaming the Freeview signal from this bridge unit across the network to all other players on the ferry. A nice little open-source application, imaginatively called dvbstream, really helped here - you can provide it with all of the details of the Freeview multiplex channel frequency and settings, the video/audio program IDs and it encapsulates the DVB-T program streams in RTP packets and sends them out across the network using multicast.

The media player on the MediaCAT is already RTP and DVB aware, so all we have to do is point it at the correct multicast address and all players on the ship can show the same TV channel at the same time, all via one TV aerial and the existing network infrastructure.

As we're in the middle of finalising the MediaCAT 4 build, we decided to make a few last minute tweaks to the build to automate the whole process - some extra configuration settings now allow you to turn a standard MediaCAT player into either a DVB stream transmitter, or to always use DVB stream receiving for displaying TV.

That all turned out to be the easy bit - picking which matches to show and working out when BBC/ITV are actually showing them is proving to be a bit trickier!

Solar Phone Charger Prize

The World Cup is officially under way now and the Red Funnel ferries are showing football matches in the bar areas to regular commuters, tourists and the thousands of people making their way too and from the Isle of Wight festival. If you are one of those passengers, take a picture of the screens showing the football (or anything else) and email it to sales@navaho.co.uk (along with your contact details) and we'll enter you into a prize draw to win a solar powered phone charger - perfect for the start of the festival season!

Prize Draw Rules

1. Entry to the competitions is restricted to one entry per person please.
2. Multiple entries will be disqualified.
3. Automated entries, bulk entries or third party entries will be disqualified!
4. Competitions are open to UK residents only unless otherwise stated
5. Prizes can only be sent to a valid UK address unless otherwise stated.
6. Winners will be chosen at random from all valid entries.
7. Winners will be contacted via email names displayed on our website.
8. The Judges decision is final and no correspondance will be entered in to.
9. The competition will run from 11th June 2010 until 11th July 2010.
10. Navaho is compliant with the data protection act. Our policy is such that we will not pass on your details to any third party without your prior consent.

To complicate matters further, MediaCAT has always supported external devices for providing display information (Freeview TV, Video inputs, GPS), to allow users to interact with the system (push buttons, interfaces to Taxi and Bus systems, touch screens) and to allow the MediaCAT to control external devices as part of a playlist (lights, projector screens etc).

In the past we have used a wide variety of devices connecting to the player via a number of different interface buses - PCI (Full, Mini and Express), Serial, Parallel Port, GPIO interfaces, USB and in one case even I2C via the VGA port!

One of the nice things about older style interfaces such as Serial, Parallel and GPIO is that they have been around since the dawn of modern computing, so reading/writing to simple devices plugged into them is easy and well supported on all hardware platforms. Even the higher bandwidth devices, such as TV/Video capture cards plugged into the PCI bus, have been around for many years and are very well supported under Linux.

The new MediaCAT4 hardware is part of a new breed of computing platform where the CPU and graphics chipset are combined in one package and the south bridge IO chip no longer provides any of the legacy IO interfaces. Whilst this greatly simplifies the hardware and reduces confusion for the user - any of the 6 USB ports can be used for any peripheral that needs to be plugged in - it does pose a few problems for us in terms of supporting some external hardware.

USB devices can be broadly split into two catagories - standards compliant and proprietary. As you might imagine, the standards complaint devices are easy to use and usually work 'out of the box' and the proprietary ones usually require a lot of blood, sweat and emails to the vendor to get going.

Standards compliant USB devices are, like the easy to use legacy ports, usually low-bandwidth devices which either use an emulated serial port, or the HID (Human Interface Device) specification. These kinds of devices include keyboards, remote controls, Digital I/O interfaces, GPS receivers and touch screens. Due to the way the MediaCAT works, almost all HID devices will be auto-detected and will work straight away with the MediaCAT, allowing you to use virtually any keyboard, remote control or touch screen.

Proprietary USB devices unfortunately provide the most requested features such as Freeview TV and video capture. There are hundreds of these devices on the market, using a wide variety of different video decoder and USB interface chipsets. In many cases, the manufacturers only provide basic Windows drivers and refuse to release any information that would allow Linux developers to add support for them.

Fortunately for us, with Linux becoming more widely used and accepted, some developers are now releasing information that allows drivers to be written - and the Linux kernel supports a huge variety of devices now. Once we do have a device working, tested and certified for use on the MediaCAT, we always have to keep an eye on availability, since some devices are only built for one batch run and are superseded in as little as 6 months.

MediaCAT 4 brings new hardware, a new kernel, a new operating system and whole range of new features, which means every device we support is going to have to be thoroughly re-tested and re-certified for use. With such a wide range of devices to check and test, it's no wonder the techies dread the shift from design to testing! ]]> General http://techblog.navaho.tv/item/gadgets-galore Mon, 24 May 2010 12:05:11 +0100 http://techblog.navaho.tv/item/plethora-of-plugs A plug for every occasion Another week and we're preparing for yet another show. This time it's Screen Expo - more details about the show can be found on our latest events page.

At the last show, the AV cupboard in our stand became a rats nest of power, network and video cables within seconds, so we thought we'd spend some time before the next show tidying everything up. Its taken us a whole week just to find the right power plugs for the media players... Whilst our MC400 Digital Signage players are fanless and can be rack mounted, the AV cupboard in our stand is too small to fix 6 of the units in. The MC100 units would easily fit into the cupboard being the size of a 3.5" hard disk and are ultra low-power - less than 4W - so can be easily stacked without getting too warm, but they're not quite powerful enough for all the complex scenes and displays we want to show off.

Luckily we managed to find a nice little barebone system, based around a netbook motherboard, which is perfect for the job. The system use the Atom 270 processor and the 945GME chipset, which is found in the MC400 player, so the MediaCAT software worked straight away. Even better, the systems have an SD card slot, which allows us to use a 4GB SD card for the MediaCAT OS and around 3GB of media storage. A small fan blowing out the side helps keep them all cool when stacked on top of each other.

Once they're all plugged in and stacked up, we were left with a rats of nest of IEC cables, power adaptors, main extension leads and DC power cables - which is what we wanted to get rid of in the first place. So we thought, why not just use one big power adapter and split it into 6 fly leads!

Finding the adapter was no problem - we had a spare 19v, 100W laptop adaptor kicking around - a bit of choc block on the DC lead, solder up some standard 2.1mm DC plugs onto some fly leads, plug it all in and away we go. Except they didn't turn on. A bit of head scratching and a multi-metering later and we realised our mistake. The original DC power plugs have an outer diamter of 5.5mm and an inner of 1.7mm. Standard 2.1mm DC plugs are 5.5mm outer and 2.1mm inner - so it looked like they fit perfectly, but there was no inner pin connection.

Now it turns out that despite this 5.5mmx1.7mm connector being pretty much standard for all Acer netbooks/nettops/laptops, they're virtually impossible to get hold of! We spent the next few days ordering and trying a plethora of different plugs, 5.5x1.3 (didn't fit), 4.8x1.7 (kept falling out) - we even resorted to trying to use some of those pin plugs from multi-purpose DC adaptors!

We we're almost at the point of cutting the leads off the original adapters when we came across Reveal Cables who stock an enormous range of plugs - luckily the 5.5mm x 1.6mm plug did the trick for us and is a nice tight fit too, so hopefully won't get knocked out!

So, 4 wiring looms later and the AV cupboard is up and running again and rats nest free. We also know where to get a new DC plug for our Acer laptop adaptors if we ever need one!

Linux, which is the base OS for the MediaCAT, has native support for the eGalax driver, however recently we've seen a lot of controllers returning touch events using the Z/Rx axes, rather than the X and Y axes - this has required a bit of hackery on our part to make sure the driver, and the MediaCAT, works with both types.

MediaCAT has always supported touchscreens, with the process of creating touch enabled content being as simple as creating a web page - the MediaCAT presents touchs on the screen as a mouse click on your web page. If it works in your web browser on your PC, then it will work with a touch screen on your MediaCAT - even if the content is Flash based!

We've added some plugins to the browser to allow the touch environment to intact with the MediaCAT scheduling system too. Standard MediaCAT commands can all be passed to the MediaCAT scheduler using Javascript functions in the web browser which can be triggered by touch events on the screen. Commands can be used to change volume levels, start playlists, play certain content such as videos, or even control external outputs.

The next release of MediaCAT (more about that in a future blog post), also provides auto start/idling of touch enabled content. Active and in-active playlists can be configured, so that as soon as a user touches the screen, the active playlist will be run. If, after a configurable period of time, there have been no touches on the screen, the MediaCAT will start the in-active playlist.

This allows a touch screen to be dual purposed, with it playing promotional or information content when not in use, but immediately loading interactive touch content as soon as user touches the screen.

The next release of MediaCAT has also had a complete graphics driver overhaul, which not only allows it to support a wider range of hardware, but it also makes better use of existing graphics chipsets - all MediaCAT graphics features can now be used in portrait mode as well as landscape for example. We've found that portrait displays are ideal for static wayfinding screens, so they will be great for interactive touch screen wayfinding systems too!

We are hoping to add some standard touch screen systems to our price list in the very near future. We are currently evaluating a couple of fully embedded touch screens (screens that have the MediaCAT hardware built into them, providing an all in one system) and we also have a couple of OEM partners who are able to offer standard kiosks and bespoke screen mounts for custom projects. If you are interested in an easy to use touch screen system, then please get in contact with us! ]]> General http://techblog.navaho.tv/item/touching-base Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:51:23 +0100 http://techblog.navaho.tv/item/confex-preview Wayfinding screens being tested for Confex 2010 The last couple of weeks in the tech department have been pretty busy getting ready for Confex 2010 which starts on Tuesday next week at Earls Court.

Our stand (G621) is covered in digital signage screens showing off dynamic wayfinding, meeting room signs/booking, touchscreens and electronic notice boards and we've had our work cut out putting together all of the kit to drive them - we even had to roll a new MediaCAT operating system to drive some brand new embedded screens!With Confex being aimed at people in the events and hotel business, we wanted to show off our Wayfinding solution which we installed at Novotel London West last year.

We've placed several 42" LCD screens in portrait mode around the stand acting as wayfinders - one of them showing actual show signage and seminar details. We have two 15" LCD panels embedded into meeting room doors, plus several other general purpose screens built into the stand. We also have a rather nice looking touchscreen and a brand new 22" LCD screen with embedded MediaCAT digital signage player.

Setting up <a href="http://www.navaho.tv" title="MediaCAT Digital Signage">MediaCAT</a> Digital Signage players for Confex

To make life more complicated, the meeting room screens also control red/green strip lights mounted above the doors to show when the room is booked/available and we also have a radio controlled keyfob which can be used to make all the screens on the stand display a simulated evacuation message at the press of a button.

Thats a lot of digital signage kit and a lot of content! Normally we'd drive all of the screens using our MC400 MediaCAT Digital Signage player, but due to space constraints, we've had to use some smaller boxes - along with the embedded screen, the touchscreen and the wayfinders, that means we have a total of six different hardware platforms in use! So far, everything has worked really well in the office - we'll find out on Monday setup if we remembered to pack all the right cables!

Confex runs from 23rd to 25th February 2010 at Earls Court 1 - to find out more about our Digital Signage, Dynamic Wayfinding and Meeting Room Sign solutions, please visit us at stand G621 - mention the TechBlog and we'll even give you a free coffee and danish! ]]> General http://techblog.navaho.tv/item/confex-preview Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:01:24 +0000 http://techblog.navaho.tv/item/navaho-mediacat-hotel-wayfinding-plugin-at-novotel-london-west Hotel Wayfinding screen testing

Some of you may have read our recent news article about the Digital Wayfinding system for the Novotel London West Hotel which we installed last year. Whilst digging through our photo archives to find some pictures of the system in action for the case study on our website, we came across some photos we took during testing in our office. If anyone left their desk for too long during that week, there was a good chance their screen would go missing!

<a href="http://www.navaho.tv" title="MediaCAT Digital Signage">MediaCAT</a> Digital wayfinding players under test

The Wayfinding solution for Novotel was quite complex - 32 meeting rooms spread across a large hotel, with 13 wayfinding screens in the lobby and in hall ways, plus several other marketing and general information screens. Staff in the Hotel needed an easy to use interface to allow them to add clients and bookings in advance and each of the wayfinder screens had to be programmed to only show meetings and directional signage for the rooms nearest to it.

Despite the complexity of the requirements, the actual processing requirements for the screens themselves was fairly low. Each meeting room and wayfinder displays a web page which is refreshed several times a minute. A central MediaCAT player not only provides the web-interface for managing bookings, but serves the content for each of the wayfinder and meeting room displays through its on-board web server. By keeping the solution simple, we were able to use our very low-power MC100 MediaCAT Digital Signage Players which not only cost very little to run and stay cool, but are also small enough to fit into the tightest spaces.

MC100 <a href="http://www.navaho.tv" title="MediaCAT Digital Signage">MediaCAT</a> Digital Signage players undergoing soak testing

In hindsight, the biggest mistake we made on this project was not ordering 50 short network cables in advance - it took us ages to make all of these up! The other thing we learnt was that if you switch on 50 switched mode power supplies at the same time, the combined in-rush current is enough to trip the RCCB in the fuse box - we weren't popular with everyone else in the office when we found that one out!

The MC100 is an ideal digital signage player for special projects like this - despite only having a 600MHz processor it can still display complex web pages, play videos and run simple slide shows and basic text tickers in portrait or landscape mode. With no processor fan and solid state storage, there are no moving parts and in fact these enclosures are completely sealed - which makes them ultra reliable. Although for this solution all content is kept on the central MediaCAT, each player has a good chunk of storage space too - there is almost a Terabyte of solid state storage in these pictures!

<a href="http://www.navaho.tv" title="MediaCAT Digital Signage">MediaCAT</a> Digital Signage players being tested

One of our biggest concerns was whether or not a standard MC400 MediaCAT player would be up to the job of handling all the requests from the wayfinders and meeting rooms screens - if it wasn't we'd have to have installed one of our Xen Platforms for the central server. Whilst the user-interface is very easy to use, it provides a lot of control over which rooms a wayfinder should show, additional static signage, logos for clients etc. All of this information is held in an SQLite database, which is file based and the SQL queries used by the wayfinder and meeting room screens were quite complex, so we weren't sure how well the system would cope.

However, we shouldn't have worried - in testing we created over 10,000 booking entries in the database and set the refresh times on the screens to a few seconds and the central MediaCAT barely broke a sweat - in fact we had it playing videos at the same time as serving all of the other screens without any affect on either the video playback or the screen updates.

The system has been running perfectly at Novotel London West for over three months now, with some very heavy usage and despite tweaking the user interface to add a few extra features for the staff, we've not had to touch the system at all - which makes the day spent making 50 network cables worth it!

If you would like to find out more about how MediaCAT can help your organisation, please visit the MediaCAT website at www.navaho.tv .

We've written yet another MediaCAT Digital Signage plugin - this one for Estate Agent window displays - except it's not actually a plugin. We actually spent more time arguing over whether it qualified as a plugin than we did writing it. We've now decided it's definitely not a plugin, but we're still not sure what to call it - perhaps a content pack is the best description for it at the moment!

The Estate Agent plugin content pack is designed to read in information about properties from an XML file generated by an Estate Agent's property management database and display a slide show of each property with images, price and description. In this particular case the Estate Agent is running Solex from Vebra, which is able to export details of a selection of properties as an XML file, along with images for each entry.

Each evening, the Estate Agent runs an export from their Solex database and copies the files onto the MediaCAT Digital Signage player across their network using the windows file sharing interface built into the MediaCAT. The Estate Agent content pack provides a web page which can be included into the MediaCAT playlists and scenes just as you would with a normal static web page. This allows the Estate Agent to easily interleave property listings with videos, slide shows or messages about other services they might offer.

The Estate Agent can also create different playlists for different times of day or week. For example they might show adverts for their services or local businesses during the day when there is more pedestrian traffic, but not at night time/weekends when people may spend longer looking at the property listings.

All the clever XML parsing and page display is actually done with Javascript in the browser itself, with a small PHP script used to remember which properties have already been displayed. This makes sure every property in the list gets shown, no matter how many times the playlist includes the page. Being mainly browser based, it is very easy to customise the whole look for the property page - from adding the Estate Agents name and logo, to changing the size and location of images and text on the page.

Using Javascript to parse XML and dynamically build a web page is a remarkably easy way of generating live digital signage displays - especially when you use AJAX calls to refresh the data. It's something we've now used in everything from airport flight information displays to real-time position maps on ferries.

For more information about how MediaCAT Digital Signage players can help your organisation, please visit the MediaCAT web site at www.navaho.tv .

One of our hardware partners, Fairchild SDS, have just got hold of an extremely bright LED backlit LCD panel. Taking advantage of some rare winter sunshine, we took it outside to see if it really is any better than a normal LCD panel.

MediaCAT Digital Signage player connected to a high brightness LCD panel

The quick answer is yes! If you look at the pictures (click on thumbnails for larger versions), you can easily see how much brighter the 10 inch high brightness panel is than a standard desktop screen - and we didn't even have a chance to turn the brightness all the way up on the new screen before the sun went in!

Indoors, the desktop screen is more than bright enough and with brightness set to 100% the display looks completely washed out. Take the desktop screen outside and even under cloud the screen is barely visible - as soon as the sun comes out, the display completely disappears. With the high brightness, sun-readable panel, the colours stand out without looking too washed out when indoors. When outside under clound, the screen really shines, with high colour moving content jumping out at you.

MediaCAT Digital Signage player connected to a sun readable LCD panel

Once the sun is out, if you are standing directly in front of the screen it does tend to disappear in glare due to the matt finish on the top layer of the LCD panel - a 'shiny' covering might help with this. Moving slightly to either side and the display re-appears and is easily visible and it has a good viewing angle too, with no colour skewing through the whole 180 degrees.

A normal desktop LCD panel emits somewhere in the region of 250-300 nits (or one candela per square meter). This high brightness panel emits well over 1000 nits and by using high efficiency LEDs for the backlight, it only draws twice as much power, despite being four times brighter.

MediaCAT Digital Signage player connected to an outdoor LCD panel

This panel isn't cheap - it's 2-3 times the price of a standard 10inch LCD panel. But for outdoor Digital Signage these panels give an outstanding, vibrant picture, visible from virtually all angles even in bright sunshine. Whilst the price is still way too high for these panels to become common place in consumer laptop/netops, in the Digital Signage market, being able to advertise to customers outdoors is a real bonus, so expect to see these in a shop window or even on a street corner in the very near future.

Although the MediaCAT Website looks similar to the old site, we've actually completely re-written the backend to create a common Content Management System for all of our corporate websites.

The new CMS allows our sales and marketing teams to publish new information, case studies and update the growing Digital Signage image gallery without have to get our web guys involved!

We've also spent a lot of time optimising the sites to reduce the image/css/javascript overheads and make everything load up a bit faster.

Now we've got all the new web site work out the way, we'll get back to updating the blog a bit more frequently and we've got a lot of interesting things to talk about.

We've got a case study on using Digital Wayfinding in Hotels, a new MediaCAT Digital Signage plugin for Estate Agents, the results of our Intel Pine Trail tests and a very nice 22" embedded LCD display to look at. ]]> General http://techblog.navaho.tv/item/new-navaho-websites-launched Mon, 1 Feb 2010 12:29:02 +0000 http://techblog.navaho.tv/item/perfect-weather-for-solar-powered-digital-signage The solar power side is actually the easiest part, we've got a small 18W panel with a big battery and a big 60W panel with a small battery just to see which combination works best in pseudo-real world tests. We're sticking with lead acid batteries purely from the ease of use point of view - they're much easier to charge and look after than lithium batteries and weight isn't really an issue for this project.

On the signage side, we're doing initial tests using Point Four DecisionVision screens (which run MediaCAT software) . Although designed for shelf edge and point-of-sale advertising in convenience stores, petrol stations and other retail outlets, they're also very low-power embedded machines - perfect for solar powered digital signage.

The project doesn't need the screens running all the time, PIR sensors will be used to detect when people are present, so that the screens can sleep the rest of the time. We'll be testing out several different ways of putting the hardware to sleep - ranging from full shutdown, to powering down as much of the system as possible and idling the CPU. A slightly higher quiescent power consumption may be acceptable if it means the screen can wake up a bit quicker.

Another thing we'll be looking at is using OLED screens instead of LCD screens. LCD screens always have a back light lit across the entire back surface of the screen, even if you're only showing content on one part of it, so their power consumption is pretty constant. OLED screens on the other hand, only emit light where it is required by the content, so a black screen should draw very little power.

This should allow us to only display content on a small part of the screen when in sleep mode to keep power usage down, but then instantly light up the rest of the screen with extra content when we detect someone walking past. An OLED screen should be a lot brighter than an LCD screen too, which is a must for outdoor usage!

OLED screens have been troubled by costs, poor lifetimes (especially the blue LEDs) and available sizes in the past. However, the latest models have apparently overcome these issues, so you can expect to see them becoming very common in Digital Signage over the next few years. We have a prototype 10 inch screen on its way to us right now - providing Apple hasn't used them all - once we've got it, we'll put it through its paces and compare it with traditional LCD screens both indoors and outdoors. ]]> Hardware http://techblog.navaho.tv/item/perfect-weather-for-solar-powered-digital-signage Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:23:00 +0000