garlic-player - SMIL Player for Digital Signage

The garlic-player is a SMIL 3.0 compatible media player that was developed specifically for the requirements of the digital signage industry.

It is used in numerous projects as well as on various Android hardware solutions.

The garlic-player offers you more independence and security for your investment by being based on the open SMIL standard standard. It works together with every compatible digital signage software. This helps also to avoid vendor lock-ins.

Documentation & Tutorials

Click on the image to see how a Raspberry Pi 4 playing four videos in zones.

Binaries can be downloaded. You will find stable releases and nightly build there.

Features (master trunk)

• Support for multiple screens (not on Android)
• multiple and overlapping zones e.g. splitscreens
• logging
• resume downloads
• 301 redirect support
• many video formats
• supported SVG 1.2. Tiny Profile, Jpg, Png and Gif
• media cache
• SMIL3 subset, HTML5, HTML5-Widgets and (depending on device) WebGL support
• WebWidgets with also support parameters
• Webserver on port 8080 for Restful Api

Official Operating Systems Supported

• Linux
• Windows
• Android
• macOS

Successfully Tested With:

• Linux 64Bit: Kde Neon, Kubuntu, Debian, Arch64
• Raspberry Pi: 3, 4, and 5 for 32 and 64Bit
• Tinker Board: (Linaro OS 1.8)
• Android Armv7 (4.4.1, 5.0.1, 5.1.1, 6.0.2, 7.1, 9 and 10)
• Windows 64Bit: 7, 8, 10, and 11
• MacOS 64Bit (Intel): High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina and Big Sur
• MacOS M1: Big Sur, Ventura (Universal Binary), Sonoma
• iOS 14.4.2 (experimental)

Command Line Options

Option	Description
-h, --help	Displays help
-v, --version	Displays version information
-c, --config	Path to config.xml
-m, --windows-mode	Full screen, big screen or window mode
-z, --windows-size	Window size in window mode, e.g. 980x540
-s, --screen-select	Starts in the selected screen

Arguments: SMIL_INDEX Path to SMIL index

For Android and iOS player-c2qml is needed, cause only QML based multimedia is supported on this operating systems.

garlic.sh [options] SMIL_INDEX

HotKeys

• toggle fullscreen with Ctrl-F (not in Android)
• toogle bigscreen with Ctrl-B (not in Android)
• quit app with Ctrl-Q
• open configuration dialog with Ctrl-S

Currently supported SMIL-Features

Time container elements

• seq
• par
• excl
• priorityClass

Attributes for excl/priorityClass time container

• peers stop|never|pause|defer
• higher stop|pause
• lower never|defer

Media-Elements

• video
• audio
• images
• brush
• html/text
• HTML Widgets

Other Elements

• prefetch
• meta for refresh index via http-equiv="Refresh"

Attributes for par and excl

• endsync first|last|id-value

Attributes for media

• region
• fit fill|meet|meetbest

Attributes for mbrush

• color color in CSS Style

Attributes for media and container (Timings and Synchronization)

• xml:id with Fallback for SMIL 2.0 id
• title stub
• restart (always|never|whenNotActive|default)
• class stub
• xml:lang stub
• repeatCount (currently only positive integer values)

Begin and End Attributes

• Clock values like dur
• Wallclock with weekday (-/+) periods and repeats. Date is supported in full ISO 8601 format not short date like 201634W.
• Events beginEvent, endEvent, activateEvent with additional clock value like id.endEvent+2s
• Syncbase values with additional clock value like id.begin+2s
• accesskey with additional clock value like accesskey('w')+2s
• indefinite
• value lists seperated by ";"

Timings with Dur

• indefinite
• media
• clock values (full+partial clock), normal (h min s and ms)

Layered multizone layouts elements:

• root-layout
• layout

Multizone attributes

• regionName
• top values in px or %
• left values in px or %
• width values in px or %
• height values in px or %
• z-index integer values
• backgroundColor values are compatible with CSS style
• backgroundImage png and jpg images (not in android player)
• backgroundRepeat values: repeat | repeatX | repeatY | noRepeat (not in android player)

HTML-like comments in SMIL-File are supported and content inside will ignored

additional features supported not in w3c standard

• shuffle play in seq container via metadata
• automatic refresh via metatags in SMIL header
• Logs/reports system and inventory-reports, events- and playlogs via subscription meta and delivery by webdav described in Reporting
• expr-attribute in media tags conditional play
• notify network trigger for begin and end attributes
• REST-API (documentation)
• placeholer in head with status and data tags
• http downloads and caching
• caching of remote SMIL index file
• caching of remote media files
• refresh via meta tag in cyclic timer periods
• http 301 redirects for index and media
• change config.xml during playback
• remote update

Contact: [Niko Sagiadinos] (mailto:garlic@sagiadinos.de)