TargetR Now Has Both Android & Raspberry Pi Digital Signage Options

August 22, 2013 by Dave Haynes

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The UK digital signage software firm TargetR now has platforms support both Android and Raspberry Pi, as well as standard PCs.

TargetR‘s new Raspberry Pi player uses the same underlying core player components from the Android Player software and in hooked into the company’s cloud-based platform.

targetrlogoThey’ve done that by adapting the player core and optimizing it using JavaFX. The Raspberry Pi player uses the OpenMax API for image playback and something called Omxplayer for video playback, which deliver 1080p images  and video.

The TargetR platform is HTML5-based and gives users full  command and control of connected devices.

Using advanced targeting metrics, users can deliver up to date and relevant content to their audience. All devices are monitored in real time and provide a full health report which is available within the web interface.

The TargetR platform encodes uploaded or imported content on the server to a variety of resolutions, ensuring the content is pre-optimized for the device based on its resolution. The Raspberry Pi player uses hardware acceleration to playback the natively encoded formats which are locally cached prior to playing, ensuring performance and reliability.

The TargetR development team have recently added a variety of content builders to the TargetR Cloud platform. Content builders now provide easy to add weather from around the world, import of documents from Google Drive, or use of Pixlr and PicMonkey for on the fly image manipulation. The TargetR Cloud platform allows direct import of content from MediaRSS providers such as Screenfeed, and RSS feeds from news sites such as BBC and CNN, or simple upload of content.

A digital signage deployment based on Raspberry Pi devices can significantly reduce costs on initial capital expenditure as compared to an x86 based hardware deployment, as well as further reduce the longer term operating costs based on its low power consumption which is generally below 5 watts.

Future enhancements to the TargetR Raspberry Pi player will include integration with Pi Cam for face counting, GPS based add-ons for Geographic targeting, and direct GPU integration for video playback using Openmax.

TargetR is one of the more interesting Android efforts I’ve seen to date, particularly because of the remote device   management capabilities and now because it is bridging several platforms. That’s not entirely unique, but still pretty rare.

As with the Android version, it is the player software and not an actual box. So users would still have to source a $35 Raspberry Pi board and the various bits needed, like an enclosure and network and storage, to make it good to go.

 

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