SSPy supporting a Kiosk via AppleTV
Hi Spys,
I've been exploring using SSPy serving a kiosk mode machine. So far I have tried 2 variations using a machine running FFox pointed at the SSPy server. I have a central issue with refreshing locking up on the machines in the browser. So when one comes up to the kiosk they are not sure if the displayed scenes are current.
The machines have been: HP Slate 21 Pro, and then RPi 3 B+ using the Slate 21 Pro as UI. ( it's a touchscreen HDMI display as well as a giant Android tablet. sorta rare ) The Pi has been a bit better.
I have moved from wireless IP connections to wired connections. I have reduced the size and format of the images. The framerate feed is about 5FPS now.
So I am wondering about using an AppleTV and the SSPy app to drive this kiosk thing. What lead me to this is considering the overhead of image display - the Pi's swap and ram are full.
I have two questions from you folks who have deployed this.
1) does the darn thing go into some kind of sleep mode?
2) how does it handle long-running service?
I've been exploring using SSPy serving a kiosk mode machine. So far I have tried 2 variations using a machine running FFox pointed at the SSPy server. I have a central issue with refreshing locking up on the machines in the browser. So when one comes up to the kiosk they are not sure if the displayed scenes are current.
The machines have been: HP Slate 21 Pro, and then RPi 3 B+ using the Slate 21 Pro as UI. ( it's a touchscreen HDMI display as well as a giant Android tablet. sorta rare ) The Pi has been a bit better.
I have moved from wireless IP connections to wired connections. I have reduced the size and format of the images. The framerate feed is about 5FPS now.
So I am wondering about using an AppleTV and the SSPy app to drive this kiosk thing. What lead me to this is considering the overhead of image display - the Pi's swap and ram are full.
I have two questions from you folks who have deployed this.
1) does the darn thing go into some kind of sleep mode?
2) how does it handle long-running service?
Comments
However it hasn't been specifically tested for this purpose, and if something does go wrong, there is no way to restart either the app or the Apple TV automatically. So while I expect it to work well for extended periods of time, you'll probably want something that is designed to be more robust.
Perhaps you should stick with your existing solution with a few tweaks. Firstly, you could try switching to the "JavaScript JPEG" method of showing the video in a web browser (as described on our blog post Adding Live Video To Any Web Page).
While the "MJPEG" method generally performs better, any temporary break in the stream will cause the stream to freeze, as there is no facility to restart it. The nature of the JavaScript method, using separate requests for each frame, should protect against this.
You could also add some extra JavaScript code to automatically reload the page periodically. And of course have the browser open the page automatically when the Pi starts up, so that it can recover from a power outage.