Zones in Digital Signage
- Where do I find zones?
- Working with zones
- Zones in general
- Creating zones
- A deeper dive into zones
- FAQ
Before digging into custom zones, aspect ratio, and how-to’s, let’s look at what digital signage zones is and how you can or cannot use them. Zones in Digital Signage are zones on your TV playing independently from each other. So, for example, you could have one zone with static content, one zone with news, and one zone with advertisements. The content itself is more or less up to you. In short, you can have multiple zones on your TV playing their own content independently from each other.
We have pre-made zone layouts, but if you have something different in mind, you can always set up your zones yourself. So let’s get to it!
Where do I find zones?
When logged in, go to Playlists and then Create Playlist. When the dialogue box opens you’ll find several predefined setups for zones.
Zones in general
What is aspect ratio?
Aspect ratio (AR) describes the proportional relationship of screen width and height (width divided by height). So a square would have an aspect ratio of 1:1, which is same as 2:2 or 100:100. Most TV screens today are in 16:9 and so is the FullHD resolution 1920×1080, because:
16 / 9 = 1.7777…
1920 / 1080 = 1.7777…
Playlist in playlist
When you create a zoned playlist from one of our presets, behind the scenes the system creates a playlist for each zone (with appropriate aspect ratios) and then creates a final ‘master’ playlist with one slide that includes all these individual zones.
Creating digital signage zones
When splitting the display area into sections, we must ensure that all these sections combined fill 100% of the screen. I recommend first drawing your zone layout on paper, ideally a grid paper as it reduces the possibility of making a mistake. In this example, I am going to create a playlist with 4 zones for a TV with a 1920:1080 resolution (Equal to a 16:9 aspect ratio).
Calculating the size of your zones can be done in multiple ways. The one I usually use I base on centimeters, so the resolution of the TV is 1920 x 1080, then I draw up a box measuring 192 mm x 108 mm and add my zones. When I’m satisfied with the size of my zones I simply measure the zone in mm, so in this case, I have the following zones.
The TV is 192 mm x 108 mm equals 1920:1080
The zone of the left is 40 mm x 90 mm equals 400:900
The zone in center is 112 mm x 90 mm equals 1120:900
The zone on the right is 40 mm x 90 mm equals 400:900
The zone in the buttom is 192 mm x 18 mm equals 1920:180
Now let’s create individual zones, you can set your custom size in the “Advanced” section when creating a playlist (Format xxxx:xxxx)
When done, I have a total of 5 playlists. I’ve changed the background color for each of the zones for illustrative purposes.
Now let’s configure the master playlist:
- Set the duration of the first slide in the playlist to ‘forever’ (master playlist should only contain 1 slide)
- [optional] Set slide background color to black
- Add individual zone playlists to the first slide using the playlist in a playlist plugin. If your measurements were correct, they should nicely fill up the entire screen:
When creating a group for your screen, you only need to set the master playlist as the base playlist.
Deeper dive into digital signage zones
Creating individual zones that fill up the content exactly can be difficult to grasp at first, this video shows you how to figure out zone dimensions.
Find it on Youtube, https://youtu.be/F03huf_ZeE0
My sub-playlists are not nicely formatted?
When you create all zones one by one manually rather than using a pre-made layout, the system does not know which playlist is a child of which (and also you can include the same playlist in several other playlists). Therefore the sub-playlists will not be formatted nicely as in the screenshot above, but do not worry – the formatting is only eye candy, all functionality still remains the same.
Can digital signage zones have transparent backgrounds?
Find it on Youtube, https://youtu.be/JnFXNaucS4Y