Installing AEM Screens Player

Last update: 2021-09-20
  • Created for:
  • Intermediate
    Admin

This page describes how to install AEM Screens player.

Available Screens Player

The AEM Screens player is available for Android, Chrome OS and Windows.

To download AEM Screens Player, visit the AEM 6.5 Player Downloads page.

NOTE

Once you download the latest Player (.exe), follow the steps on the player to complete the ad-hoc installation:

  1. Long-press on the top left corner to open the admin panel.
  2. Navigate to Configuration from the left action menu and enter the location address of the AEM instance in Server and click Save.
  3. Click on the Registration link from the left action menu and the steps below to complete the device registration process.

Basic Playback Monitoring

The player reports various playback metrics with each ping that defaults to 30 seconds. Based on these metrics, we can detect various edge cases such as stuck experience, blank screen, and scheduling issues. This lets us understand and troubleshoot issues on the device, and thus expedites an investigation and corrective measures with you.

Basic Playback monitoring in an AEM Screens player allows us to:

  • Remotely monitor, if a player is properly playing content.

  • Improve reactivity to blank screens or broken experiences in the field.

  • Decreases the risk of showing a broken experience to the end user.

Understanding Properties

The following properties are included in each ping:

Property Description
id the player identifier
activeChannel currently playing channel path, or null if nothing is scheduled
activeElements comma-separated string, currently visible elements in all playing sequence channels (multiple in case of a multi-zone layout)
isDefaultContent true if the playing channel is considered a default or fallback channel (that is, has priority 1 and no schedule)
hasContentChanged true if the content changed in the last 5 minutes, false otherwise
lastContentChange timestamp of the last content change
NOTE

Optionally, a more advanced property can be enabled from the player preferences (Enable Playback Monitoring) and that is:

Property Description
isContentRendering true if the GPU can confirm it is playing actual content (based on pixel analysis)

Limitations

Few limitations to basic playback monitoring are listed below:

  • The player reports its own playback state to the server, so it requires an active connection.

  • The isContentRendering property that checks the GPU is currently too resource intensive to be enabled by default and requires explicit opt-in from the player preferences. It is recommended not to use it in conjunction with videos in production.

  • This feature is only supported for sequence channels and does not yet cover the interactive channels (SPA) use case.

  • The metrics are not yet fully exposed to our customers, we are working hard on enabling dashboard-like reporting and alerting mechanism in the near future.

Additional Resources

Refer to the following topics for an in-depth information:

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