garlic-player - Open Source SMIL Player for Digital Signage

The garlic-player is a SMIL 3.0 compatible Digital Signage Player.

The goal for the development is to create a most as neccessary SMIL 3.0 compatible and as most as possible platform independent free open source multimedia player to meet the needs of the digital signage industry. Currently garlic-player has reached a high level of compatibility and stability. So it is used in many projects and some android hardware solutions.

Digital Signage is a relatively young business and it has a lack of standards. As customer you can easily trapped into a vendor-lock. A standard like SMIL gives you independence back.

The garlic-player can be used offline and online.

Based on SMIL standard it works together with every compatible Digital Signage Software.

You are able to play local and remote (via http) SMIL files with the features described below.

Libraries used

• Qt5 >= 5.10 (5.12.x LTS recommended)
• QtAV >= 1.13.0 as alternative to QtMultimedia
• Quazip 0.7.3 (included in ./src/ext)
• zlib 1.2.11 (included in ./src/ext)

Current Operating System Supported

• Linux
• Windows
• Android
• macOS

Successful tested with:

• Linux 64Bit: Kde Neon, Kubuntu, Debian, Arch64
• Raspberry Pi: 3 and 4 for 32 and 64Bit
• Tinker Board: (Linaro OS 1.8)
• Android Armv7 (4.4.1, 5.0.1, 5.1.1, 6.0.2, 7.1, 9 and 10)
• Windows 64Bit: 7, 8 and 10
• MacOS 64Bit (Intel): High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina and Big Sur
• MacOS M1: Big Sur (via Rosetta 2)
• iOS 14.4.2 (experimental)

For Android and iOS player-c2qml is needed, cause only QML Multimedia is supported on this operating systems.

garlic.sh [options] SMIL_INDEX

Command line options

• -h, --help Displays this help.
• -v, --version Displays version information.
• -c, --config path to a config.xml
• -m, --windows-mode fullscreen, bigscreen (when multi monitor) or windowed mode
• -z, --windows-size size of windows (when windows mode) e.g. 980x540 means 980px width and 540px height
• -s, --screen-select Starts in selected screen number

Arguments: SMIL_INDEX Path to SMIL index

Binaries can be downloaded at garlic-player.com. You will find stable releases and nightly build there.

Features (master trunk)

• Support for multiple screens (not on Android)
• multiple and overlapping zones e.g. splitscreens
• logging
• resume downloads
• 301 redirect support
• lot's of video formats
• supported SVG 1.2. Tiny Profile, Jpg, Png and Gif
• media cache
• SMIL3 subset, HTML5, HTML5-Widgets and (depending on device) WebGL support
• WebWidgets with also support parameters

Currently supported SMIL-Features

Time container elements

• seq
• par
• excl
• priorityClass

Attributes for excl/priorityClass time container

• peers stop|never|pause|defer
• higher stop|pause
• lower never|defer

Media-Elements

• video
• audio
• images
• brush
• html/text
• HTML Widgets

Other Elements

• prefetch
• meta for refresh index via http-equiv="Refresh"

Attributes for par and excl

• endsync first|last|id-value

Attributes for media

• region
• fit fill|meet|meetbest
• mediaAlign (only for images) topLeft|topMid|topRight|midLeft|center|midRight|bottomLeft|bottomMid|bottomRight

Attributes for mbrush

• color color in CSS Stsyle

Attributes for media and container (Timings and Synchronization)

• xml:id with Fallback for SMIL 2.0 id
• title stub
• restart (always|never|whenNotActive|default)
• class stub
• xml:lang stub
• repeatCount (currently only positive integer values)

Begin and End Attributes

• *Clock values like dur
• Wallclock with weekday (-/+) periods and repeats. Date is supported in full ISO 8601 format not short date like 201634W.
• Events beginEvent, endEvent, activateEvent with additional clock value like id.endEvent+2s
• Syncbase values with additional clock value like id.begin+2s
• accesskey with additional clock value like accesskey('w')+2s
• indefinite
• value lists seperated by ";"

Timings with Dur

• indefinite
• media
• clock values (full+partial clock), normal (h min s and ms)

Layered multizone layouts elements:

• root-layout
• layout

Multizone attributes

• regionName
• top values in px or %
• left values in px or %
• width values in px or %
• height values in px or %
• z-index integer values
• backgroundColor values are compatible with CSS style
• backgroundImage png and jpg images (not in android player)
• backgroundRepeat values: repeat | repeatX | repeatY | noRepeat (not in android player)

HTML-like comments in SMIL-File are supported and content inside will ignored

additional features supported not in w3c standard

• shuffle play in seq container via metadata
• automatic refresh via metatags in SMIL header
• Logs/reports system and inventory-reports, events- and playlogs via subscription meta and delivery by webdav like described in a-smil.org Reporting
• expr-attribute in media tags for conditional play as described in a-smil.org by IAdea
• placeholer in head with status and data tags
• http downloads and caching
• caching of remote SMIL index file
• caching of remote media files
• refresh via meta tag in cyclic timer periods
• http 301 redirects for index and media
• change config.xml during plaback
• remote update

HotKeys

• toogle fullscreen with Ctrl-F (not in Android)
• toogle bigscreen with Ctrl-B (not in Android)
• quit app with Ctrl-Q
• open configuration dialog with Ctrl-S

future ToDo's

• REST API
• trigger for strings like ean-codes

Contact: [Nikolaos Sagiadinos] (mailto:[email protected]) [Paul Bozan] ([email protected])