2013
GETTING STARTED WITH
DIGITAL SIGNAGE
CE Labs, Inc.
Let CE Labs show you how easy digital signage can really be and how it can
assist you in achieving a greater ROI.
Mike Kaylor
CE Labs, Inc.
5/15/2013
Digital Signage
WHY DO I NEED DIGITAL SIGNAGE
Why do you need digital signage in your business? Digital signage can assist customers in
making wise purchase decisions and drive sales.
In this day and age businesses are concerned with their e-commerce online. Their focusing
most of their attention on the web and neglecting their brick-and –mortar store fronts. It’s
being reported that by the year 2016 at least 91% of all retail sales will still be from a brickand –mortar store front. If Internet Sales Tax legislation passes, this will only continue to
push consumers back into the local establishments.
Brands are trying to figure we best way to spend their advertising dollars to get their sales
message across, whether it is in radio, television, print ads, or in-store advertising. With
digital signage you can take those television and print ads and reintroduce them to the
customer right at the product shelf.
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 1
WHERE TO START
CHOOSING YOUR DIGITAL SIGNAGE MEDIA PLAYER
One of the first
things you need to decide is what player best fits your needs. CE Labs offers many players,
all with different capabilities. For the sake of this document, we’re going to simplify things
down to the 5 major player options: Networkable or Stand-Alone Player, with or without
GPIO (Push Buttons) capabilities and All in One.
NETWORK-READY vs. STAND-ALONE
Network-Ready means that players are attached to an Ethernet network and can be
controlled by either a PC running QuickSign Pro or a Server running CCM Enterprise.
Network-Ready media players are most often used in environments where there will be
multiple players with different content that need to be updated frequently and/or are
spaced far apart.
Stand-Alone players do not have any type of network connections. Files must be copied
from the PC to the media card. Then the media card would have to be walked over and
manually inserted into the player. Stand-Alone players offer no reporting, logging or
scheduling capabilities. These are excellent for use in single displays (counter, shelf etc.)
that won’t need to be updated too often.
GPIO (Push Buttons)
GIOP Push Buttons are several buttons (depending on the player) attached to the player.
They allow the player to be programmable and interactive. The player runs a loop clip and
then when one of the buttons is depressed, an associated video clip will play, then the unit
will return to playing the loop clip once that video clip has finished.
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 2
DELIVERING CONTENT
After determining what player best suits our application, we need to be concerned with
what type of content delivery system best fits.
STAND-ALONE PLAYERS
Stand-alone players simply play videos or images. They have no software to control them
and you must remove the media card from the player and place it in a PC, in order to add
new content to the player. These types of players use SD cards and USB pen drives.
NOTE: SD cards should be a high quality, name brand, and must be CLASS 6 or above
and preferably CLASS 10. This holds true for stand-alone as well as networkable media
players.
NETWORK PLAYERS
QUCKSIGN PRO
QuickSign Pro is a Windows only piece of software, free of charge, to manage your players
over a local area network within a single subnet. If you need to manage players across
multiple subnets or over the Internet, then you should be looking into CCM Enterprise.
QuickSign Pro is a media manager that allows you to send videos, images, playlist,
templates, and simple schedules to the player. It’ll allow you to configure the hardware
and do updates to the players.
While it is not a content creation tool, it will allow you to build templates, and layouts,
combining images, videos, RSS feeds, and weather information on the same screen.
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 3
QuickSign Pro will allow you to manage multiple players at a single time. It is not intended
to be an enterprise solution.
One of the great things about QuickSign Pro is you don’t need to know the IP address of the
player. Upon startup, it will search your network for players. When players are found, they
are populated into QuickSign Pro.
QuickSign Pro has no manual. Everything you need to know is built into the extensive help
system.
QuickSign Pro has the ability to publish your playlist and media to a SD card or USB pen
drive so they can be manually load the player without the use of a network.
NOTE: When downloading QuickSign Pro. Make sure you have the correct version for
the player you are trying to control.
Quick Sign for HD300ZX
Quick Sign 400
Quick Sign Pro 500EX
Quick Sign Pro 7XX
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 4
CCM ENTERPRISE
CCM Enterprise is a solution designed to allow control of many players in different
locations around the world. The system uses what is called a “Call Home System”. What
this means is the players call the server at predefined time intervals in the same way a PC
would call up a website. Therefore under normal conditions you would not need to do any
modifications to your firewall configuration.
If you sell advertisements on your players, CCM Enterprise will allow you to log when an ad
was played. This allows for reporting to your customer how many times an ad ran in a
given time period.
Players can be setup in groups, allowing for simple management of a large number of
players at single time.
CCM Enterprise is truly an enterprise solution capable of managing a vast amount of
players on a global scale.
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 5
A good example of using GPIO buttons:
Main Loop : Car Video
Button 1 : Drive Train
Button 2 : Interior
Button 3 : Exterior
Button 4 : Accessories
Button 5 : Well you get the idea….
ALL IN ONE
The All in One digital signage media players like the AIO710 are a touch screen user interface device. They’re
capable of displaying video and / or HTML elements on
the internal LCD screen. With the HDMI output, the AIO710 is designed to drive an external monitor with
additional video and images with simultaneous HTML on
the internal LCD. They allow for the ultimate in
programmability and interactive customer experience.
They’re networkable and are fully compatible with QuickSign Pro and CCM Enterprise.
If you have any question about our players or your current project, please call our sells
department and let us assist in designing a solution for you.
SIMPLE CONTENT CREATION
Once you’ve decided on which player fits your needs then we can move to creating content
to play on that player.
Creating good looking content doesn’t have to be expensive nor does it have to be hired out.
Sure, professionally created content will always look better but with today’s tools, making
decent content for your digital signage is simply a click away.
CREATING VIDEO CONTENT
Creating Video Content for your digital signage player can be simpler than you think. Here
are some ways to create content for your digital signage project.
Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 or above, is one of the absolute simplest ways to get started
in creating content. With all the animations, wipes, and fades built into PowerPoint, you
can make really nice content to play on your digital signage media player. The key is to
save your work as a .wvm video file.
CE Labs also offers several Microsoft PowerPoint Templates. Please check the website for
more information.
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 6
SAVING POWERPOINT SLIDES AS A VIDEO
Under the Design Tab in PowerPoint 2010 includes page setups for 16:9 video screens
sizes. You will want to select this to ensure your output fits your widescreen properly.
With PowerPoint 2010 and above you can now save in .wmv video format. This cuts out
having to purchase a conversion program and saves a step in the process.
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 7
If you own an older version of PowerPoint, there are converters on the Internet that can
convert your PowerPoint to a supported video format.
NOTE: CE Labs, digital signage media players do not natively support Microsoft
PowerPoint .ppt format. Just do the “SAVE AS” and save your PowerPoint as a video.
Microsoft Movie Maker is also a great tool that is included with Windows to edit and put
together video clips and still images.
iMovie for Mac users can be used in much of the same way as Microsoft Movie Maker. You
would need to transcode the .mov file to a supported format such as .mpg, .wmv, or .mp4.
Plus there are many more video editors to choose from.
NOTE: CE Labs also has a talented staff of artist that can create professional content
for your business.
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 8
IMAGES
Displaying images (.gif, .jpg, .png) on your digital signage media player can be a great way
to get your point across. You need to be aware that the images must be sized appropriately
to fit on the screen.
Selecting an image that’s very small with not much resolution can be displayed on your
digital signage player but won’t look very good on your monitor and will often be blurry
and grainy. Just because it looks good on a PC monitor doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll
look good on a large high definition monitor.
Multi-mega pixel cameras of today can
shoot images several times larger than
even your high definition monitor can
display. If the images are not resized
properly, it can take the player several
seconds for these images to load.
Remember to resize your images to their
usage size for faster loaded.
Recommended Free/Shareware software to resize your images includes:
Microsoft Paint
(Comes with Microsoft Windows)
Format Factory (Win)
Paint.Net (Win)
Gimp (Win, Mac, Linux)
One of the better ways to display images on the digital signage media player is to turn your
stills into a video clip. This way you can put wipes, fades, and animation in between your
images to make your content more professional looking.
Note: There’s a good chance you may have print ads or other print materials you could
scan in and repurpose as images.
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 9
VIDEO TRANSCODING
What exactly is Video Transcoding and why do I need to be concerned with it? Video
transcoding is the process of converting digital video files from one format to another. All
of the videos we watch on our computers, tablets, mobile phones, set-top boxes and yes,
our digital media players must go through a transcoding process to convert the original
“source” video to be viewable on these devices. Why? Because different devices and
browsers support different video formats. This process is called “transcoding”, “reencoding”, and “video conversion.”
Transcoding video for your digital signage presentation can be pretty overwhelming. If
you’ve never done transcoding before, there are tutorials are all over the web, but most are
not focused on creating video content for digital signage. Video transcoding is not simple.
There are a lot of transcoding options available. Finding what works best for your player
requires some understanding of those options and understanding of what formats and
specification your player will accept.
Recommended Free/Shareware software to re-encode your videos includes:
Format Factory (Win)
Handbrake (H.264) (Win, Mac, Linux)
Video settings you’re going to want to take notice of:
Video Format: MPEG-2, MPEG4, H.264, WMV
Megabits per Second: Listed in peak Mbps.
These settings can vary somewhat depending on the model of video player you choose. If
you’re not sure of your settings, always refer back to your player’s specifications for details.
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 10
OTHER TYPES OF CONTENT
RSS FEEDS
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content.
Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an
RSS Feed to whoever wants it.
Some examples of what can be put in the "RSS Feed URL" field within QuickSign Pro:
http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories
http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/movies
http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/world
http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/sports
http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews?format=xml
http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/entertainment?format=xml
http://www.prh.noaa.gov/hnl/xml/Surf.xml
http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/stocks
http://rss.hamweather.net/zone/us/tx/dallas.xml
http://www.tuaw.com/rss.xml
RSS FEEDS may be free for home use but not free in a commercial environment. Please
check with the feed provider prior to using their RSS feeds for legality.
The feeds listed above are used for examples only.
WEATHER FEED
CELabs currently offers weather feeds for use with our digital signage players. It’s
supports most major cities in the US only. Place the following string in your QuickSign Pro
or CCM Enterprise template in the weather zone and replace the information with your
location. If your weather isn’t working for your location, try a larger metropolitan city in
your area.
Weather Example
http://weather.celabs-ccm.net/celabs.xml?zip=75041&city=garland&st=tx
Simply replace the following:
zip= zipcode
city = your city
st = state
NOTE: RSS and Weather Feeds require a network media player.
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 11
INSTALLATION
A lot of times just a digital signage media player and a monitor aren’t enough. Maybe you
need to drive a TV wall, or a wall of televisions, or need to extend your cable. CE Labs has
you covered for any need you may have.
CE Labs is much more than JUST a digital signage company. We have a full line of Pro
Audio Visual products to marry with your digital signage media players to fulfill whatever
your requirements may be.
With our engineering staff and art department, we can handle any custom project.
Give us a call and tell us your requirements. Let us design an off the shelf or custom
solution that best fits your needs.
WHAT SETS CE LABS APART
 Leader in manufacturing Pro-AV equipment for over 25 years.
 24 Hour tech support in the USA
 Large engineering staff capable of custom design to build projects
 US Owned and Operated!
 Our customer base ranges from the single person to the largest big box houses in the
world.
 We do business globally
 Our products are built for 24/7 365 operation without downtime.
 We can create your content with a full content development department in house
CE LABS, Inc. | 800-767-6189 | www.celabs.net
Page 12