HTML & ID-AL video players

The ID-AL video players VP320, VP330 and EVP380 can display HTML content alongside linear playback (video, audio or picture).
This feature makes it possible to enhance presentation scenario.

The following documentation is a technical overview of the feature.

Serving web pages

A lightweight HTTP server capable of serving static content is embedded into the video players. It can be used to display HTML document in a autonomous way.
The video player can obviously display content hosted on an external server. In that case, you have to make sure that the content provider can be trusted.

It is possible to store HTML pages on a USB stick, a microSD card or into the device internal storage within the www folder.
The video player can display these pages using URLs prefixed with http://localhost/www/.
Third party browsers can display them using URLs prefixed with http://<video player ip address>/www/.

Displaying web pages

The embedded web browser can be started by the video playback engine using tags in media files and folders names.

It is necessary to add a web-config.json file into the www folder in order to link numeric identifiers to URLs.
It is then possible to use these identifiers in [WEBS x] or [WEBE x] tags to start displaying web pages.

For more information about the web-config.json syntax, please refer to the Websites configuration tutorial.
For more information about files and folders tags, please refer to the Files and folders tags tutorial.

Controlling the video player from an HTML page

A JavaScript API is available to control the video player.
HTML pages can access various aspects of the video player, such as:

  • audio volume control,
  • playback control (play, stop, pause...),
  • printer management,
  • log file management,
  • serial port,
  • input and output contacts,
  • state changes notifications.

For more information, please refer to the Control interfaces tutorial.

Network error management

The video player has an integrated and customizable error management system to process page loading error.
For more information, please refer to the Network error management tutorial.

Limitations

While it's possible to use the HTML <video> tag, it's use it not recommended as the rendering is not fully hardware accelerated.
So please, don't use it!