u/514sid

Have you tried Anthias? I think it’s a perfect fit for your needs. It’s free and open-source.

Hey, this post can stay up since there's no product name or link.

One heads-up though: the tier/"promotional angle" table reads like a commercial pitch, and that's where the sub draws the line. Per rules 2 and 4, naming, linking, or promoting your own product isn't allowed unless it's open source.

If it's open source, feel free to share it in future posts. Otherwise keep it to the technical discussion.

Thanks!

Ran into this kind of thing a lot. With Android signage it's almost never the CMS, it's the hardware. You have to start from what the box can actually do, not from how good the code is.

Multi zone is where cheap Android devices fall apart. Each video zone needs its own hardware decoder and a lot of SoCs only give you one or two. Some can't even run two 1080p streams together. When the decoder can't start you usually don't get a proper error, just black.

Rendering can also be the problem. Multiple SurfaceViews don't layer properly on Android, they can go black or cover each other. TextureView layers fine but it's heavier on the GPU, so on weak boxes it's not always better.

Could also be simpler stuff, zones coming out 0x0 because of pixel vs percent or density scaling, the player not parsing the multi zone layout right, or content not cached yet when the layout starts.

If you want to dig in, read up on MediaCodec (getMaxSupportedInstances is a good start), SurfaceView vs TextureView, how ExoPlayer/Media3 handles several players at once, and get comfortable with adb logcat. Codec support per chipset is worth looking into too, H.264 vs HEVC and resolution limits differ a lot.

Also, basically no signage vendor guarantees every feature on every Android device. That's why the serious ones have certified hardware lists. Even gapless 1080p to 1080p is hard on a lot of boxes since you need a second decoder preloading the next file while the first one plays. Same limit that kills multi zone.

It’s gonna take some time. I suggest you start looking into remote management already. There’s a post somewhere on the subreddit with the research.

You can try connecting a laptop first just to see how the panels are mapped. There's a 95% chance the sending card simply grabs an X by Y pixel area from the top left corner of the screen, which makes it super easy to work with. Whatever shows up in that corner is what appears on the screen.

Yes, if the SignCommand controller connected via HDMI to another device inside the sign, that device is almost certainly a sending card, and it's the part that actually drives the LED panels. The dead controller is just a small media PC.

That means you can replace it with a Raspberry Pi, a mini PC, or even an Android TV box. The sending card keeps its configuration and simply displays whatever video signal it receives, so in most cases it works without reconfiguring anything. Just plug in the new device and play your content using any digital signage CMS that supports your chosen hardware.

the cheaper product, in many cases, becomes the more expensive product, and in many cases, the one giving you a headache

Exactly!

I've added an "Open source" flair to help distinguish these posts.

I've been in the industry for about 6 years, so I've seen a lot of customer setups.

Pretty much everyone who scales ends up in the same place: content is managed centrally and pushed by tags or groups (region, store type, screen zone), and stores get maybe one or two slots for local announcements or local campaigns, filled from approved templates. When every location does its own thing it gets messy fast. But locking stores out completely doesn't work either, there's always something location specific to show and if the system won't let them do it they'll find some workaround, usually an ugly one.

Expired content honestly comes down to habits more than software. Scheduling and auto-expiry have existed in every CMS forever, and still "why is our Christmas promo up in February" was a ticket I saw at every company I worked at. It's not rare at all to open a customer's account and find playlists with a start date and no end date.

Pricing in static images is the other trap. Someone changes a price and now it's a design request plus republishing to every store, and sooner or later a screen shows the wrong number. Customers who hooked up a product/price feed to dynamic templates just stopped having that problem.

Monitoring is the thing nobody cares about until they grow. With one or two stores you can literally look at the screen. Past 20-30 screens you need offline alerts, screenshots and proof-of-play logs, because store staff will walk past a dead screen for weeks without telling anyone. Seen it so many times.

So yeah, central push with tags, mandatory end dates, price feed instead of baked-in prices, and some kind of fleet monitoring. That combination is basically what separates the customers where 100 screens runs itself from the ones where 15 screens is somebody's part-time job.

I don't think that part holds up, though. Visibility on Reddit comes mostly from upvotes and how much attention a post gets early on, not from how many comments it has. Look at the actual numbers, most vendor replies here sit at a score of zero or one, they're barely getting upvoted, so they're not doing much for how visible the post actually is. If anything, a thread that turns into ten similar pitches is more likely to get skipped by someone scrolling past, not less. The last year backs this up too, all those vendor replies were happening the whole time, and visits still went down while membership went up. Whatever was keeping this place visible, it wasn't that.

It means something that you're willing to say the repeated replies get annoying, most people wouldn't admit that.

On incumbents versus newcomers, I actually think it works the other way.

Whoever has the most time to reply gets the most out of a thread like that, and that's usually not the solo founder. What worked for you here was being useful, not the pitch, and that part is still welcome.

Ten similar replies in one thread don't help the person asking, and they don't help you much either, nobody reads the fifth one closely.

Sharing something real, like a cafe you set up with Juuno, would probably get you more attention than another comment that looks like everyone else's, because the people who see it are actually interested in that specific case.

Appreciate you engaging with this seriously, genuinely. Went through your comment history before replying, wanted to check the argument against your own record rather than just assert it. It's close to a 50/50 split, half genuinely useful troubleshooting nobody would object to, half "take a look at HipDeck" in a recommendation thread. You're actually one of the better examples of a vendor adding real value in this data, so this isn't really aimed at you, it's more that even in a good case like yours, half of it is still the pitch.

The value doesn't disappear though. Vendor flair means people already know who you are and what you make, so explaining how a pain point actually gets solved still works and still gets you visibility, you just don't need your own brand in the sentence to get credit for good advice. That part's fully available to you every time you post here.

On it getting quiet: I think it's already quiet, and for exactly that reason. When someone takes the time to write a real answer and it gets buried under five or six near-identical vendor replies, why would they bother next time? I've gotten a lot of DMs here and on Discord about this exact thing, people who stopped commenting because it felt pointless.

This also isn't the last word on how vendors fit in here. Once there's a clearer sense of how to do it without it turning spammy again, I'd like to find room for more flexibility.

Appreciate you weighing in directly. Six or seven years running an account here is exactly the kind of tenure that should get heard, even where we land in different places. Going through this in order.

I think this includes us as well. [...] I agree that vendor accounts should be advised not to do so, unless they are posting for the first couple of times before getting the flair.

Agreed, easy yes. A brand new vendor account shouldn't get flagged before it's had a chance to add the flair.

I think these threads are useful. I view them as "mini RFPs" that the sub can provide meaningful value. [...] They are especially useful to emerging vendors that might have niche solutions for specific needs.

The question itself is usually genuine, that's not what's broken. What's broken is trying to pick an answer out of ten replies that all read almost the same, "check out ours", with barely anything to actually tell them apart. And the vendors who benefit most from keeping that door open aren't the emerging or niche ones, they're whoever has someone paid to watch Reddit for signage keywords all day. A solo dev with a genuinely niche solution doesn't have that. If anything, closing recommendation threads levels the field down rather than up.

Open source in most cases is just a business model. [...] I do not understand the basis for this distinction.

This is the real disagreement, I think. It's not about business model, plenty of open-source projects sell hosting and that's fine. It's about who can actually give a disinterested answer. Anyone can read the code, fork it, or fix it themselves, so anyone here can genuinely help without a stake in the outcome. For closed software, the real answer, pricing, roadmap, what's actually possible, sits behind the vendor.

Genuinely worth trying yourselves if you want to see how it actually feels from the other side. In my experience it's FOSS first and monetization second, not the other way around, because maintaining something properly in your free time is close to impossible. I've been trying exactly that with Screenlite and it's brutal, the project's on pause right now because it turned out to be a full-time job on its own. That's probably why there aren't many open-source signage products at all, SignageList lists under 20 total, and fewer than 10 of those are actually maintained, against something like 600 commercial ones.

IMHO, this is not future-proof and the sub will be flooded by releases and announcements of open source platforms that provide little to no incremental value to anyone.

Let's solve that one when it actually shows up rather than pre-emptively. If it does become a real problem, other subreddits handle exactly this by requiring a project to be live for 3-6 months before it's allowed to be posted, which filters out the weekend vibe-coded ones without touching anything that sticks around. That's a fix we can add later with real cases, not a reason to close the door now.

To me the difference is pretty clear: building something open source and posting updates on it is you spending money and time and giving the result away. Building closed-source commercial software and working threads for leads, including hunting keywords across subreddits, is the opposite of that.

Personally, I hate the "we do not support this, but take a look" much more than "try that and if it does not work check out our product". [...] Unless the rule is different for open-source solutions :)

The useful part of "try that, and if it doesn't work, check out our product" is "try that". Same practical help without the second half, nothing lost except the free ad. Fair catch on the open-source question though, there is a real difference: you can name and announce your own open-source project as its own release post, that's the whole point of the exception. What doesn't change is dropping your own project into someone else's thread as a tacked-on plug, open source or not, that's still using their question as a hook instead of just posting your release on its own.

Yes, these are much more interesting in a community. I do not know how to spur such activity. If I can somehow help towards that, lmk.

Genuinely, why not start yourself? You've got a lot of customers, and an actual installation story with photos now and then, not every day, just when there's a good one, would be a nice thing to see here.

Overall, I feel that this is being driven by the mods own biased view on what should be included in the sub or not. [...] I am sorry to see this sub getting so restrictive, simply due to biases from new mods.

I'd rather answer that with what I actually looked at than argue about it. Before writing any of this, I pulled the mod log, a year of removed posts, and the account histories of the accounts showing up most, including my own company's and yours. Screenly's account gets held to the same no-pitch rule as anyone else's, that's already written down.

On your account specifically: I analyzed its comment history across Reddit, and roughly two-thirds of it names Yodeck. It's not just here either, in subs like r/sysadmin, r/techsupport, and r/PowerBI it's closer to eight or nine in ten.

That's not a hunch about commercial vendors in general, that's what showed up when I checked.

None of this is engraved in stone, though. If you've got specific changes you'd want to propose, it'd be worth its own thread rather than a reply buried down here, so other members can actually weigh in and we hear more than just the two of us on it.

Fair, and I'd add one thing: it also matters whose solution it is. "We built a solution based on Y" reads differently if Y is a third-party tool versus your own product. Recommending someone else's tool with real detail is great. Narrating your own product's deployment in detail is still self-promotion, just better dressed.

Self-hostable solutions under a proper license are genuinely good for the community and the industry.

If a project also sells hosting, that's fine by me. Building and maintaining software isn't free, and it helps keep the project maintained and active. Feels fair.

https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalsignage/comments/1vharf8/comment/p24d59i/

The pi 4 handles 4k fine if you encode the videos as h265, it has a hardware hevc decoder good for 4k60. That's a dedicated chip that decodes video without touching the CPU.

Video codecs also only store the differences between frames, most frames are just "small changes from the last one", which is why files stay small.

Splitting into frames throws that away, every frame becomes a full image the CPU has to decode in software 60 times a second, and the pi's CPU can't do that at 4k.

You'd get stutter and dropped frames. Just re-encode to hevc and let the hardware decoder do its job.

That was bad wording on my part, not an attempt to mislead. u/mvip version is accurate: Claude writes a lot of the code, including fixing issues raised on GitHub and building new features. It's all in the commit messages anyway, so there would be no point in hiding it.

And honestly, I understand why people push on AI involvement. Today you can build hundreds of digital signage products in a week with AI tools. They look polished, have nice landing pages, and there's no way to tell from the outside which ones are genuine projects worth trying and which will be abandoned in a month. That noise makes discovery genuinely harder, so asking "how much of this is AI" is a fair filter.

The point I should have made clearly: Anthias is not that. It's been around for 10+ years, long before any of these tools existed. The direction and decisions come from humans who know the codebase, and everything is reviewed and tested against real hardware before shipping. AI changed how fast we iterate, not who's responsible for the project.

Correct. Right now, Anthias doesn’t include a centralized dashboard.

Each device runs its own web server, so you can manage it directly when you’re on the same network. We’re also planning to extend Anthias with support for a centralized management server and build that server as part of the project.

In the meantime, Anthias exposes an API, so you can automate many management tasks or build a simple custom UI to manage your devices, depending on your needs.

Anthias has existed for more than 10 years, long before the current wave of AI tools. It’s an established open source project in the digital signage space.

AI is used as a development assistant, not as the author of the project. In practice, that means things like helping draft PR descriptions, exploring existing issues, suggesting refactors, and sometimes generating code that is then reviewed, tested, and adjusted by humans. You can think of it as a second developer that helps catch mistakes and speed things up, but it does not replace code review, testing, or decision-making.

The release itself was built and reviewed by humans. AI helps with productivity, but it is not shipping unreviewed code or autonomously driving the project.

As for the Reddit post, it was written by me and then grammar-checked with AI. It was not generated from scratch.