Audience Digital Signage System Upgrade from 3.3 to 3.5

There was an issue with sending video to client’s digital signs using our digital signage system called Audience 3.3.

We recently had a request to display a video on the School of Business’s digital signs. A video was created as a MPG, version 2. Several years ago we did this without any problems.

I was able to have the video display on the Audience system using “local/host”. Note: Audience will convert MPG to WMV files. However, the system could not push to the video (via the web) out to our clients display. The video would appear only as a black rectangle.

I spent a good deal of time trying to research the issue. To make a long story short, audience can not push video to displays using Internet Explorer 7 or 8. It would display only on IE 6. Our Audience system has IE6 and that is why it could display the video just fine. However, for security reasons, I could not expect our clients to downgrade to IE6.

I contacted the tech department of Capital Networks (the maker of Audience) and they confirmed an issue with IE7 and 8. I was referred to their sale person. He suggested upgrading to an entirely new system for around $4,000. That included a new computer, video card, graphic card along with new software. He suggested that I get back in contact with the tech department to make sure there would be no issues with displaying the video.

I called back to the tech department and was told that just having a software upgrade should take care of this issue. This software upgrade would be free. However, they wanted to take some time to make sure there would not be a problem. After a week (without hearing back from them) I emailed them and found out that there was indeed an issue with the new software being able to push video to IE8 and they were researching the problem.

Then it became a comedy of errors. I dealt with three different tech people. None of whom were communitcating with each other. First there was a delay on researching the video issue. Then I was sent a software patch. After trying to install this patch I realized it was for the software upgrade Audience 3.5. I had never received the upgrade.

After several days I was sent the link for the upgrade. I had to download the software upgrade in sections from their FTP from their server. I was asked that before I install the upgrade to call the tech desk for help. When I called them, they had me do the install and walked me through manually upgrading the software.

Once everything was loaded, I hung up and tried to load the video on a test playback. It did not work. I called the tech desk back and found out through trial and error that the videos must be placed within a folder on the C drive called Digimation. Once I did that the video was encoded as a WMV and it played. The older software did not care where the video file resided.

Keep in mind our Playbacks are pushed out over the internet. The system updates every 30 minutes so every time I made a change I have to wait for a result. I also had to use another computer that had IE8 installed to confirm the outcome. It was a matter of patience.

The final result is that we are able now to push video to the client’s computers and signs.

Now when I load a video I have to match the display time to the length of the video.

Success!