Bigscreen Player

This version is: 1.0 Date: 30-6-2006

Some info

This player was created for use at Drome langaming events, to present information on bigscreens in a stylish and animated fashion. Development for this particular program started in april 2004. It has currently undergone 15 beta versions. This is version 1.0 and probably the last one, since coming the upcoming Drome event (13) is the last one. It tries to connect to a server as configured in the config.bsml file. BSML stands for BigsSreen Markup Language (yeah I know), which is pretty much HTML or SGL or whatever markup language. The files downloaded from the server are all either BSML files, or media files (images and fonts). All in all it pretty much resembles an internet browser. The player can't do anything else than play, administration of the contents has to be done by third party. For example, an intranet for remote editing of the pages. The pages are downloaded through HTTP so pages can be generated dynamically by a webserver and some smart programming in ASP or PHP or whatever floats your boat. The following pages are required on the server : - a Cue file - All the page files as mentioned in the cue file

The cue file is basicly the playlist file, and it looks like this:

<bsml>
	<page file="..." duration=x.y>
	<page ...>
	<page ...>
</bsml>

The player parses this and queue's pages in order as mentioned in the cue file. The more interesting stuff happens in page files. There are several design tags possible, the design can then be canceled by closing tags. Just like normal HTML. However, there are a few things that's not possible in HTML, and there are a LOT of things BSML can't do. Since the possibilities of BSML are pretty limited I'll summarize them here :

<bsml>
	<font face="..." style="..." color="..." size=x>
		This text has special font properties!
	</font>
	
	<img src="..." left=x.x top=y.y width=w.w height=h.h>
		Images don't need a closing tag.
		
	<margin left=x.x top=y.y right=r.r>
		The following text is made sure to fit between the margins.
		A bottom margin is useless.
	</margin>
	
	<fade delay=
...