Content from external source

Sometimes it can be preferable to have some of your content delivered from an external source, such as a news agency, weather service, etc. There are several different ways of doing this and this article will cover some of them.

News ticker from text file

If you are using the DISE RSS Reader to create a news ticker text file or if an external partner is providing you with a text file with news this is the recommended setup.

On the player, configure DISE Probe so that it will use a separate Download Location for downloading the news text file.
Setup the Destination directory to download the files to for example C:\News\.
On the manager, create the same directory as you did on the player PC and create a text file there with the same name as the news text file that you are going to use for the news source/RSS feed.
In DISE Composer, create a ticker and select the news text file in the Data Connection dialog. Make sure that File exists locally on player is checked.

Read more: Ticker on top of content

Read more: Creating an RSS News Ticker

Images from HTTP links

If you have a partner that provide images on a web server (for example weather graphics) this is a possible configuration.

Create a scene where you add one image object for each "web image". Since the Image object is capable of using URLs directly, just add the URL for the image you would like to show.
It is important that you configure the Download dependencies for HTTP links continuously in the Image object to the interval that you would like to download each URL.

Video files from FTP

If you have a partner that provide video files (for example news content) from a FTP server this is a possible configuration.

Note: This configuration is a bit more complex and you will need to configure this on both the manager and player PC.

The recommended configuration is to have DISE Probe downloading the video files to a directory separate from all your other content on your Player PC. And then you will have a "dummy" directory on your manager that contains dummy video files that you use to create the DISE movie containing the video files. It is important that the video files always have the same name, for example News_1.wmv, News_2.wmv, etc.

Player configuration

Create a new Download Location in DISE Probe for downloading the video files from your or your partners FTP server.
Setup the Destination Directory so that DISE Probe will download these files to an directory for example C:\NewsVideos\.
Setup the Download Interval to how often these files should be downloaded.

Manager configuration

Create a directory with the same name as on the player PC so that you can use the same paths on both the manager and player PCs for accessing the video files.
Create one or more scenes where you add the video files. If you have any other objects on the same scene as these video files it is important that you lock the times of all the objects because the length of these video files could change which will change the playback time of the video and then most likely of the scene.

Then there are only one thing left to configure, since these video files will be updated directly to the Player PC without your intervention it is important that you will not send out the Video files using Bridge. To block Bridge to send out certain content we can configure a blacklist.

Start DISE Bridge and add the DISE movie that you have created.
Right click on the destination that you are using and select Edit Database.
From the Edit Database dialog select Database / Edit Blacklist from the menu.
Click on the Add Mask button and enter the path where you have put the video files, end with a '*', for example C:\NewsVideos\*.

This will prevent DISE Bridge to send out any files matching this mask and you can test this by looking for the video files in question in the database where it should say Blacklisted.