We’ve had a busy few weeks of making new things for TrilbyTV in the run-up to the end of the year and have released a bumper set of features in version 4.2 of TrilbyTV. Some were covered in our December newsletter, and a few crept in unnoticed!
As a digital signage product made for education we are always looking to make the software work well for those specific school and college situations that traditional legacy signage tools often passed over while remaining a modern solution to signage. We’ve got great plans for 2019 and beyond, but we always want your feedback and input so please do get in touch.
Playlist Permissions
Our updated Playlist Permission toolset allows you to control who has access to edit a playlist (before this was open to any moderator). This enables you to restrict who can update a playlist to specific users, and then link a screen to a playlist. This allows you to ensure the Reception Player can only be updated by the Reception team, with content chosen only by them. Or your Science department can look after their screens without having access to ones in Art, all without having to set up any complex management.
It’s all done with groups and permissions, which sounds a bit involved but is really easy to use, just like the rest of TrilbyTV. We’ve made a brief support article to walk you through the process. Read our Playlist Permissions guide.
Video Quality options
You can now switch up your video quality on TrilbyTV with the new Video Quality options on the System dashboard.
Until today, all video was compressed to a format suitable for playback on most TVs and devices, but as more sites are now adding bigger and higher quality screens you are demanding better-looking video – too right! In fact, some of our customers are running 82″ screens and multi-screen video walls with TrilbyTV!
Changing from 480p to 720p or higher will use more of your storage. The System Dashboard will take a guess at exactly how much more before you confirm the switch up, so make sure you have enough free storage before you do this. Most of our customers should be able to switch to 720p without overrunning but if you need more space and want the higher quality, you can purchase additional storage for your subscription. TrilbyTV will re-convert all of your content to the higher quality after you switch. You will need to adjust your player settings to tell them what quality to play and after a while, your players will start showing your new crisp HQ videos.
Additional options to switch to 1080p and even 4K are also now available – note that only original content uploaded at these qualities will work. If you upload a standard 480 video we won’t magically make a 4k version.
Note that your TrilbyTV Players must be updated to version 4.2 or later to support HQ playback.
Apple TV Zero-touch deployment
Apple TV makes an excellent digital signage player – while it currently cannot play back web content (we’re waiting for Apple to allow this!) it is an affordable player capable of showing 4K video and all the other goodness from TrilbyTV.
We are delighted to announce that we now support zero-touch deployment of TrilbyTV on Apple TV. This means an Apple TV purchased through your friendly reseller with Device Enrolment can be hooked up to TrilbyTV straight out of the box.
Using your Mobile Device Management tool of choice, once the Apple TV is connected to the network (and power!) you can push out the TrilbyTV Player app, configure your wireless and Single App Mode, along with a unique configuration setting you get from the TrilbyTV Player Dashboard. This will link the TrilbyTV Player to your system, allocate a code and add it to the Player Dashboard ready for you to select which content you want to play.
Note that your Apple TV TrilbyTV Players must be updated to version 4.2 or later to support zero-touch deployment.
We’ve made a guide to help walk through the process.
Start time for content
For a while you have had the option to auto-delete content on a specific day, and with this release, you can also now set content to show from a particular day and time. This is great for situations where you might prepare content in advance. For example, a Student of the Week title screen can be set up on a Thursday and then set to show from 8am on Friday.
The “Show on players after…” setting is on all content types and can be changed when you first add the content along with the auto-delete time. This makes it very easy to manage content.
Player updates to 4.2
All of the new features above are available now, some will require an update to your player apps. 4.2 is the current version and is available now on all platforms.
As well as support for new features we’ve spent more time streamlining and speeding up the player apps and making them communicate better with our servers and behave better when there are connection issues.
Player performance is, of course, a critical part of any digital signage platform and we hope the 4.2 update brings increased stability and better playback to all.
To get the 4.2 player app for your platform, just visit your devices App Store and grab the updates. Sometimes you’ll need to restart the player hardware to get the update running and you can see what version is in use on your TrilbyTV Player Dashboard.
As always we are on hand to help via chat on our support pages, and email.