Content guidelines and restrictions for BrightSign client
BrightSign has some restrictions on what type of formats it will accept
General restrictions
BrightSign series 5
BrightSign Series 5 players no longer support per widget rotation. Only the entire display can be rotated.
This means non Hardware Accelerated player will rotate but the media source inside them will not
BrightSign series 4
Rotating 4K video content to portrait does not work on Series 4 players.
The way to accomplish 4K Portrait on a series 4 players is to keep the Content and player rotation in Landscape mode and encode the 4K video to be 3840x2160 (Landscape Resolution but rotated 90 degrees).
Text widgets
Stationary text is among the easiest contents to render and in itself doesn't cause any issues. However, there can be an impact on speed if the text has an animation or effect (such as drop shadow) added to it or is placed above or behind another animated widget. This impact depends on the length and size of the text as well as the complexity and motion of the animations involved.
If you experience playback speed issues consider reducing or removing the mentioned factors.
Image widgets
Similar to the text widgets, stationary images have a low-performance impact but they have more influencing factors. In addition to the animations and effects attachable to text widgets, images can have relatively large file sizes. Large image files not only affect network usage, but they can slow down page swaps if the overall size or number of images, needed to be shown at once, is too big. If you are concerned about file size try to improve the compression ratio by converting the images to jpg or png format.
Semi-transparent or animated gif images can take additional resources to play. Images that are resized in the editor can also cause additional computation for the browser to render. Try to use the images in their native resolution and always consider the absolute maximum resolution allowed for each BrightSign device as described in the best practices document linked above, otherwise, the image will not render at all.
Video widgets
Videos also have the same influencing factors as images but they can be even more impactful.
Videos have a frame rate property that determines how many frames need to be rendered per second. Higher frame rates make the file size larger and the playback consumes more resources. If you experience issues, convert your videos to a lower resolution, lower frame rate, or use a codec with a better compression ratio.
We recommend that if you want to display high-resolution videos then you should minimize the number of other widgets on that page.
Content widgets
The content widget runs in an iframe, which inherently has performance issues on some devices due to the iframe implementation on the platform. The widget loads another instance of the entire displayer (or loop displayer with loops) within the iframe. This results in substantial extra workload on the device, especially if multiple widgets are used simultaneously.
Please use this widget while keeping performance in mind.
These widgets have the highest impact on page load speed, and they are mainly a convenience solution intended to use in stationary contents or playlists that don't have frequent page swaps. If you experience any issues, try to put the elements of your embedded content directly on the page without the content widget.