Players and Screens

Players and Screens

What it is

A player is the physical device that drives a screen — a SpinetiX HMP, a BrightSign box, a Samsung or LG display. Every screen you manage in CreaRack appears in the Players list in the Signage sidebar, with a live status dot (online, warning, offline). A screen counts as online only with recent evidence: a live monitoring check, or a deep-discovery snapshot taken in the last 24 hours; an old snapshot alone shows the screen as unknown. Use the search box and the status and group filters to find devices quickly.

Next to each device’s brand you may see a capability badge:

• Push (green) — this brand has a real content-deployment integration: CreaRack can send playlists and media to the device (SpinetiX, BrightSign, Samsung, LG, Yodeck, Signagelive, IAdea).
• Monitor only (gray) — CreaRack monitors the device (status, metrics via SNMP), but the brand exposes no content-deployment API, so publishing content to it is not possible (Crestron, Philips, Barco, Christie, NEC/Sharp). Controlling the physical screen itself — powering it on or off, switching its input — is not available from CreaRack for any brand yet.

If a device shows no badge, CreaRack could not match its brand to a known integration yet.

How to add a player

Players are not created by hand — they come from network discovery:

1. Open the Terminal. Under Network Tools, click Auto-Provision.
2. In step 1, Discovery, scan a single IP or a whole subnet.
3. In step 2, Results & Assign, set the destination of each detected media player to Digital Signage.
4. Open the Signage page. The new players appear in the sidebar.

Only devices the discovery could actually identify become players. An address that merely answered a ping — no brand, no model, nothing verified — is not a screen, so it stays in the network inventory without a page and is not counted here; this also holds when such profiles arrive through a restored backup. Once a later discovery identifies it, it takes its place in the list.

How to publish a playlist to a screen

1. Go to the Playlists tab.
2. On the playlist card, click Publish (or Save & Publish from the playlist editor).
3. In the device picker, check the target screens. Filter by group or tick All to select every visible device. Each row shows a status dot, name and IP.
4. Adjust the Playback Settings if needed: duration per slide, transition, fit mode, loop.
5. Click Publish.

You can also publish a single asset or a selection straight from the Content tab with the Publish button.

How content reaches the player

For SpinetiX players on your LAN, the deploy runs through the Local Agent (CreaRackAgent.exe):

1. CreaRack prepares the content and a publish URL.
2. The Local Agent connects to the player and configures its Scheduled Download.
3. The player periodically pulls the content from CreaRack and starts playing it.

Player credentials are resolved from the Credential Store by ID — the Local Agent fetches the username and password server-side, and your browser never receives them. If no HTTP credential is stored, CreaRack prompts you once per session; save the credential under Config > Credentials to skip the prompt.

How to control playback

The Content and Playlists tabs share two playback buttons:

• Pause / Resume — pause or resume playback on selected devices.
• Clear Playback — replace what is on screen with one of: Corporate Image (your branding full-screen), Black Screen, Test Pattern (SMPTE bars), Restart Content (force a re-download), or Clear All Content (screens go black).

Every operation lands in the History tab, where you can inspect it and click Restore to roll a device back to its previous state.

These playback controls change what the player shows; they do not power the physical screen on or off or switch its input — CreaRack does not control the screen hardware itself.

How to organize players into groups

1. Click Manage Groups at the bottom of the sidebar.
2. Type a name, pick a color, and click Create.
3. Assign devices to the group and click Save.

Groups feed the sidebar filter and the device picker, so you can publish to a whole location in one go.

Click a group name in the sidebar to open its tab: aggregated stats, charts and the member list. The tab header has a toolbar with Report (the fleet report scoped to this group), Deep Discover (deep discovery of every player in the group, two at a time, with the progress shown on the button), Refresh (reload now), New Tab (open the group in its own browser tab), Manage Members and Export CSV (download the member table).

How to monitor a player

Click a player in the sidebar to open its detail view: hardware info, a live content preview, status, and network data, plus performance charts. The pills above the charts set their time range: “1h”, “4h”, “12h”, “24h”, “7d” and “30d”; on the two long ranges the tooltip shows the day as well as the time. The bandwidth charts of the overview and the charts of a group tab offer the same six ranges. From the header you can:

• Deep Discover — run a deep SNMP scan of the device
• Report — generate a per-device report (one chart per row; under every chart, its Highest and Lowest three values with day and time; Print for a portrait PDF). The report charts CPU and memory usage; there is no Uptime chart, and the Uptime column of its CSV is the time the player has currently been on, in seconds
• Config — edit the device’s credentials and groups
• Assign Port — link the player to a physical switch port

Troubleshooting

• No players in the sidebar — run the Auto-Provision Wizard and assign the devices to Digital Signage.
• A device you expected is not listed — if the discovery only got a ping answer from it, it is not identified as a player yet. Run Deep Discover or a new discovery on that address; once it reports a brand, it appears.
• Deploy fails on a SpinetiX — make sure the Local Agent is running on a PC in the same LAN as the player, and that an HTTP credential for the player exists in the Credential Store.
• Player shows offline — check the device’s network link in the detail view, then click Refresh All in the sidebar.
• A device shows “Monitor only” — that brand cannot receive content from CreaRack; you can still see its status and metrics, but not control what is on screen or the screen itself.

Related

• [[crearack—network—auto-provision-wizard]] — discovering and assigning players
• [[crearack—signage—playlists]] — building what plays on screen
• [[crearack—signage—deploy-and-credentials]] — deploy flow and credential handling
• [[crearack—settings—credential-store]] — storing player credentials
• [[crearack—terminal—local-agent]] — installing the Local Agent
• [[crearack—signage—troubleshooting]] — more signage fixes

Véase también

• [[crearack—network—auto-provision-wizard]]
• [[crearack—signage—playlists]]
• [[crearack—signage—deploy-and-credentials]]
• [[crearack—settings—credential-store]]
• [[crearack—terminal—local-agent]]
• [[crearack—signage—troubleshooting]]