As much as I read the help documentation and tried every possible setting it comes to my mind, I can not understand how scheduling and the waiting for sync affect each other.
I need to play a video on 3 screens at the same time, for which I’m using the video Wall Video Player. This video is around 10 mins long, and it needs to play every half hour, so, 12:00, 12:30, 13:00… play only once and then stay black up to the next time slot.
From the scheduler, I can’t find a way to have a time slot without any setup running, so I created a blackout setup with a black background to play at all the times and then scheduled the setup with the video at each time slot. The black setup works, but when it’s time to switch to the video, it never works as expected. Sometimes it just stays black, but on the web interface it says it has the video setup assigned but it doesn’t play it. Other times it switches, and then it just stays 500 seconds doing the waiting for sync countdown before starting, which is a problem because it starts more than 8 minutes later.
How I’m supposed, or is it possible to achieve what I need? It seems a very basic setup, yet I can’t find how to make it work.
Sorry for delayed response. Precise scheduling of video wall playback isn’t easy due how video walls synchronize in all default video wall packages. Devices don’t communicate with each other for synchronization. Instead each device gets the precise clock time from an NTP server. With each device now having synced clocks they can independently derive when to start playing content so it is synchronized across all devices: If you, for example, have a playlist that is exactly 10 minutes (down to the millisecond!) long, payback for that playlist can start at 10:00, 10:10, 10:20 and so on.
The advantage of this mechanism is that there’s no communication across devices (which is often prevented in WiFi setups with client isolation enabled) and the only shared info each device needs is the time from an NTP server. The downside is that you can’t arbitrarily switch to the video wall player setup and expect it to start instantly.
What you can try in your case:
Make sure your playlist is exactly 10 minutes long. Even 10 minutes and 10 milliseconds would mess up the synchronization, so make sure it’s really exactly 10 minutes.
Use the setup scheduler to schedule the video wall setup one minute early. So at 11:59, 12:29 and so on. That way the video wall setup is already running on the devices once the next synchronized playback cycle starts.