IAdea, a leading maker of digital signage media players, is demonstrating its flagship XMP-300 Full-HD Open API Media Player at the 2009 Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas. The XMP series device enables cross-device SMIL-compatibility to accommodate myriad signage applications and solutions. Devices on exhibit in the annual tradeshow include the upcoming XMP-200 standard-definition media player and an 8” digital mini signboard, all featuring W3C open standard SMIL compatibility.
SMIL Open API allows system integrators to quickly program the behavior of a digital signage system using XML scripts. A SMIL script is a dynamic playlist instructing a media player to play back audio, video, graphics, and text crawls in designated regions of the screen. Simple loops, parallel scheduling, and prioritized insertions can be pre-programmed to a fixed wall-clock time or instantaneously triggered by external network events. SMIL is also well suited to mixed-mode streaming and cached playback, providing flexibility as well as robustness adaptable to network conditions. Full specification of the SMIL standard can be found on the website of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): http://www.w3c.org/
A number of digital signage software packages have been developed to work with any SMIL-compliant digital signage media player. Adfotain Manager Express software is a full-fledged signage application utilizing SMIL. Featuring a familiar Windows-based application interface, users can easily manage multiple media players on a local area network. Users can schedule playback loops or weekly schedule using familiar drag-and-drop operations, and save them as templates for reuse. The IAdea Bridge Server enables participating legacy digital signage network management systems to work with any SMIL device by dynamically translating between proprietary protocols and the Open API.
As more vendors join the market and create products based on the SMIL open standard, digital signage is becoming the next Internet, where opportunities flourish in non-proprietary protocols. A robust, common standard such as SMIL by W3C enables compatible products to compete and complement each other for the benefit of the customer and content providers. Operators and system integrators who request SMIL-compliant products will be ensured long term compatibility, reusable customization efforts, product availability, and development support.
For more information regarding SMIL and Open API products from IAdea, visit http://www.IAdea.com.
