This week, our team thought of doing something different from our usual postings – we decided to open up the NDSP-500 digital signage player and give you a brief look at what’s inside one of these players. The video is not of the greatest quality but it does give you an idea of the components inside a typical digital signage player and what connections are available. So here’s the video:

As you can clearly see, the unit is small… it’s smaller than half of an A4 paper. With this particular unit, there are several connectors at the front:

1. RS232 – this is usually to provide serial communications with another device. It can be used to control and manage an display screen – that’s if the screen supports RS232.
2. Secure compartment to store the SD card – it’s also a quick way to easily swap out the SD card without having to open up the box

At the back of the unit you will notice the following connectors:

1.Video output:  the unit has these typical connections – S-Video Output/Composite Video and Audio, DVI, and VGA.

2. Video Input: Composite Video and Audio. With this particular unit you will be able to connect a video input source such as a DVD player, Foxtel, CCTV camera etc.

3. S/PDIF – for great audio quality

4. LAN port which support 10/100 Mbps

5. Two USB ports for connecting USB Storage

6. Power plug to connect the power supply. This power plug was different from other digital signage players we’ve seen in the past. It basically has a connector which allows you to twist and screw the power cable to the power plug.

Inside the player, all you will find is a circuit board, a frame for a small hard disk and several cables. As you can see from the video, you will not find a fan inside the player – this makes the unit very quiet when it’s turned on.

Would you like to see more videos? Let us know what you’ll like to see and we’ll try to get it done.

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Blog Products, Digital Signage Blog Video

We’ve all heard the saying “content is king” and the success of any digital signage business is dependent on what content is  displayed. In this particular post we won’t go into too much detail on how important content is… we all know that without content, a digital signage network becomes useless – not many people like watching a blank screen.  However, I decided to raise the question whether businesses have a system in place for backing up their content from their digital signage players.  Would you be able to reproduce the same content from scratch if you didn’t have a copy of the content somewhere?

I guess this is something businesses operating a digital signage network should think about. In the past, experiencing a hard-drive failure can be quite devasting and often quite expensive if you count the number of hours it would take to reproduce the same content. From the top of my head, I could only come up with several ways of backing up the content and these are:

1. Centralise and store the content onto a dedicated server with RAID configuration harddrives. In addition to this, have the files scheduled to be copied to an external storage such as a USB external HHD.
2. If you cannot afford a dedicated server, have the harddrives on the digital signage player set up in a RAID configuration – most operating systems are able to have this function but it will mean have at least two physical hard drives. Otherwise you could always copy the files onto an external medium (CD, DVD, Memory card, HHD, etc).
3. Have files distributed across multiple servers or across an external site (e.g. data center)

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For those techies out there, what is the best backup strategy?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Techie