• reliability - fanless solid-state for 24/7 operation
• portability - standard removable compact flash card storage
• software - comes with Adfotain Manager Express for full-fledged playlist management
• content - quickly compose and export content with Microsoft PowerPoint 2003/2007 integration
• elegance - VESA mount and compact industrial grade mechanical designs for professional signage installations

IAdea players offer dedicated industrial-grade design, reliable operation, and complete signage management solutions for a fraction of a PC player's cost. To achieve the same reliability and management setup, industrial grade PCs and premium signage software can cost users magnitudes more than an IAdea RISC based solution.

Even when playing high quality Full HD 1080p videos, each IAdea player consumes just 4 to 7 watts, approximately 1/10 the energy of typical PC-based players. For large deployments with 24/7 operation, this amounts to a significant reduction of your total carbon footprint and energy bills.

Adobe Flash animation cannot be played natively on most RISC based players, including IAdea's players, since it usually demands higher CPU processing power. For an optimized presentation and smooth viewing experience, we recommend converting the Flash animation to video for digital signage use. More details are provided in the Content Creation and Management FAQ.

Yes, through some development effort. IAdea XMP media players and XDS Digital Signboards utilize SMIL XML syntax over the SOAP API, making it easier than proprietary systems to customize and connect. Please visit www.a-smil.org for details on SMIL for digital signage.

No. IAdea media players play files from local storage and does not support video streaming over the network. This delivers an optimum viewing experience free of playback quality issues such as stuttering, blocking, or blue-screens.

However, XMP series players support dynamic content delivery to push individual files quickly over the network using the SOAP API. This method is a compromise between live streaming with its high bandwidth demands and entire playlist content updates which necessitate longer update cycles.

IAdea media players lets you create content for display using Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 and 2007 as a layout tool. Adfotain Manager Express converts PowerPoint files on PowerPoint-equipped PCs into still frame slide shows. This lets users leverage the easy to use templates, text, 3D, and image composition features offered by PowerPoint. The duration of each auto-advancing slide is preserved as you have set it in PowerPoint, but animations and transitions will be removed.

IAdea players are based on the Linux kernel.

Yes. IAdea players offer wireless networking via the PWA-100 Wireless Network Adapter. The compact module can be installed out of sight, replacing the Ethernet cable connection with a fast and secure Wi-Fi connection.

IAdea solutions are Adfotain Manager Express, Scala-enabled* , and SMIL programmability via SOAP API* .

(*XMP & XDS series only)

All IAdea players provide out-of-the-box signage capabilities with bundled Adfotain Manager Express PC software. Create content with Microsoft PowerPoint and publish directly over the network for on the schedule playback.

The XML based SMIL by W3C lets system integrators follow a common and established language when developing digital signage applications. Like HTML, SMIL is defined by W3C, the leading international standards organization for the World Wide Web. SMIL is to multimedia as HTML is to web documents, offering a standard language for interoperability and cross-device consistency. Development tools and information available at www.a-smil.org

For Scala networks, IAdea X-series players are Scala-ready for instant connectivity to new or existing Scala networks. This allows you to greatly expand the number of screens with dedicated players at a fraction of the cost of conventional PC players (Scala license required).

SMIL (pronounced “smile”) stands for “Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language” and defines scheduling (“synchronized”), video, audio, images, text (“multimedia”), multi-zone screen layout (“integration”) in an XML-based text file format (“language”). It is an open specification (royalty-free to use) created by the World-Wide Web Consortium, the same organization responsible for defining the HTML language, an open standard for the Internet. Products that utilize SMIL are available from leading companies such as Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Real Networks.

Digital signage deals with scheduling multimedia files for playback on digital displays connected on an IP network. The industry has roots tracing back for a few decades, but has recently expanded rapidly due to the proliferation of low-cost flat panel displays that are easy to install and maintain in public space. As the market expands out of the “emerging” status, mainstream customers demand compatibility and interoperability among products from different vendors. SMIL appears to be an ideal technology to answer the needs of the industry.