Media Library

Everything a screen can show lives here — seven different kinds of thing, and the difference between them is mostly about who decides what appears.

The seven kinds

ImageJPEG or PNG. Has no natural length, so you set one — ten seconds is the usual choice.

VideoMP4. Uses its own duration unless you shorten it. Sound is off unless you say otherwise.

HTML5A zipped web animation, as an agency delivers it. Uploaded as a .zip; the player finds the entry page inside.

WidgetLive content the platform draws: weather, or an RSS ticker. Nothing to upload.

AudioA track for the Audio zone — background music, a spoken announcement.

VASTA video ad tag from an ad server, played live each time. Nothing is stored.

Ad slotA hole in your loop that is auctioned every time it comes round. See the advertising articles.

The first five are yours: you decided what they are and they play exactly as uploaded. The last two are live: something is fetched at the moment of play, and what appears is decided then. That distinction runs through the whole product — live items are never cached, never play offline, and are counted differently.

Uploading files#

Add the files
Upload file takes images, videos, audio tracks and .zip files holding an HTML5 creative, several at a time. Choose them together in the picker or drag them onto the window; files dropped on the Media Library page open the window with them already listed. Each file becomes a creative of its own.
A file that cannot be uploaded — over 100 MB, or not an image, a video, a sound or a .zip — stays in the list in red with the reason under it, and is left out. The × at the end of a row takes a file off the list.
Name each one
Every file has its own row, and its name starts as the file's own. Change it: the name you type is the name you will see everywhere afterwards. Agencies deliver files called af484d8c-1983-47bd.mp4, and a library of those is a library you cannot use.
Set durations where needed
Each row has its own Seconds on screen. Images and HTML5 have no length of their own and hold the screen for the seconds you set. Video and audio do, and their field is pre-filled from the file — shorten it to cut a long video down, but do not lengthen it past its own end or the screen holds a frozen last frame.

One Upload sends them all, one after another, and each row shows its own progress. If some fail, they stay in the window with the server's reason — the storage is full, a bundle has no page in it — and Try again sends only those.

HTML5 creatives#

Upload the .zip exactly as the agency delivered it. The player unpacks it and works out which file to open — most bundles put an index.html at the root, but plenty wrap everything in a folder, and some ad-server exports use a small shell page that loads the real creative in a frame. All three are handled.

If an HTML5 creative shows white

It is nearly always one of two things: the bundle has no HTML file at its root at all, or it reaches out to the network for something that is not inside the zip. The gallery preview shows exactly what the screen will show, so check there before scheduling it.

Widgets#

Two, both drawn by the platform rather than uploaded: a weather panel for a town you choose — or for wherever each screen happens to be — and a news panel that reads a feed you give it. We fetch what they show, so the screen itself asks the internet for nothing. See Widgets.