What are Client Side Feeds?
Historically, when you wanted to display dynamic content from sources like MRSS feeds or even use features like nested or local playlists, the Signagelive cloud would handle the heavy lifting. It would read the feed information, process it, and then send your player a simple list of media assets to display. The player wouldn't even know it was playing content that originated from a feed.
Client Side Feeds (CSF) changes this process significantly.
With CSF, the Tizen player itself becomes responsible for reading and processing the feed information. Instead of receiving a pre-processed playlist from the cloud, the player receives the feed directly. This includes processing MRSS feeds, as well as nested and local playlists, which are also treated as feeds.
This change was introduced for Samsung Tizen Players in Signagelive Client 1.29, released on 15th January 2024. With this update, MRSS content began to be synced to Tizen Players in a JSON format.
What Benefits Does CSF Bring to Tizen Players?
Introducing Client Side Feeds on Tizen players provides several advantages:
Reduced Cloud Syncing: By processing the feed information on the player, the need for the Signagelive cloud to repeatedly sync with MRSS feeds to check for updates is potentially reduced.
Improved Randomisation for Nested Playlists: A notable benefit is the ability for Nested Playlists to play back content in a truly randomised order. Previously, when the cloud processed these feeds, setting 'Random' playback order on a Nested Playlist would result in the same sequence repeating each time the playlist looped. With CSF, the player handles the randomisation, allowing for a different order on each loop.
Client Side Feeds and Sync Groups (Tizen Client 1.32 Hotfix)
An important update in Tizen client 1.32 provides a hotfix to extend the capabilities of Client Side Feeds. This hotfix specifically enabled support for using Nested and Local Playlists, as well as MRSS Feeds, in the following scenarios:
When a player is in a sync group. Players will now support sync functionality when using these feed types.
When a player is not in a sync group, enabling support for gapless playlist functionality when using these feed types.
Important Note
In the Tizen 1.32 hotfix, the support for using Nested/Local Playlists and MRSS Feeds in sync groups or for gapless playback was limited to scenarios where the master playlist is video-only. Testing for this feature focused on video assets due to this constraint.
Other known limitations in the 1.32 release include:
Randomise functionality is not supported for 'Play Order' testing in this specific release.
The option to specify 'Play to the duration I have set below' at the Nested/Local/MRSS asset level is not a supported use case and has not been implemented for Tizen CSF.
The Tizen 1.32 update, released on 26th February 2024, also included bug fixes related to using nested/local control assets and MRSS feeds causing players to go black, and issues with sync when using local/nested playlists in portrait mode.
By leveraging Client Side Feeds, Tizen players can now handle dynamic content processing more independently, leading to performance benefits and enhanced features like true randomisation for nested content. The hotfix in 1.32 further expanded this by enabling the use of feeds within sync groups and supporting gapless playback for video-only playlists.