TweetOut Mini Player
The BL TweetOut Mini Player is an optional tool for Ross Video’s XPression graphic platform users who want to preview content without using XPression as a CG operator. The TweetOut Mini Player is installed locally on the same system running XPression Studio as it uses an instance of the Ross XPression engine to run. Your Ross XPression license must have the API option enabled to work.
Access TweetOut Mini Player
To access the TweetOut Mini Player, run it from its desktop icon on the XPression system.
When you run the TweetOut Mini Player, you are prompted with database connection preferences. Click OK to use the current configuration.
Notes:
The TweetOut Mini Player must be configured to connect to your TweetOut database. Connection and user authentication values would have been correctly configured during the initial installation. Use caution when modifying these values. Contact Bannister Lake Support for assistance.
From this database connection dialog, you also test your connection to your database by clicking Test Connection. This can be a handy troubleshooting step.
The version of the TweetOut Mini Player installed must match the version of XPression Studio installed. If your XPression installation is upgraded to a new version, you will need to upgrade your TweetOut Mini Player as well. Contact Bannister Lake Support for assistance.
In this section:
XPression Scene Tag Naming Conventions
Specific naming convention preparations are required in XPression scenes in order to use the TweetOut Mini Player to preview real-time content.
Scene Names
All scenes in the XPF are available for play out.
Animation Controllers
Animation controllers are optional. If animation controllers for tweetOn, tweetNext and tweetOff don’t exist for a scene, then the on effect plays the full scene; the next effect just changes the values of the tags and the off fades off. The animation controllers specify the range of frames to play. All tracks for that range are played.
- tweetOn
- tweetNext
- tweetOff
Tags
When using animation controllers, the 1 tags are used for tweetOn, the 1 tags take you to the 2 tags for the tweetNext animation, and the 2 tags are used for tweetOff.
- ^account1
- ^account2
- ^name1
- ^name2
- ^tweet1
- ^tweet2
- ^avatar1 - uses material avatar1
- ^avatar2 - uses material avatar2
- ^title – topic or playlist name
- ^multi – special tag allowing multiple fields to be formatted into a single textbox with support for changing fonts. This uses a format metadata tag to define the format of how to render the textbox. For example, “<red>{account}: <blue>{tweet}” formats the textbox by using fontname red for the account name followed by fontname blue for the Tweet. So <> is used for specifying fonts and {} is used for specifying field. Also, any other text can be formatted in there. The supported fields include: {account} , {name} , {title} , and {tweet}
Materials
- avatar1 - shader name “Texture”
- avatar2 - shader name “Texture”
Playout Behaviour
TweetOn:
- set both 1 and 2 tags to tweet
- position to start of TweetOn’s range
- play range
TweetNext
- set current tweet to the 1 tags
- position to the start of TweetNext’s range
- set new tweet to the 2 tags
- play range
TweetOff
- position to start of TweetOff’s range
- play range
Preview Content Using TweetOut Mini Player
The TweetOut Mini Player allows you to grab new content, including playlists and topics, without affecting output.
- Browse to and specify the XPression Project file whose content you want to preview.
- Select the XPression Scene you want to preview.
- Specify Layer and xpr Channel information if needed.
- Specify the TweetOut Topic and settings or Playlist you want to preview.
- Previewing your content is as easy as 1, 2, 3:
- Click Show to preview that scene or press the F1 key.
- Click Next to preview the next scene or press F2 key.
- Click Get Tweets or press the F3 key to get the latest content.
- The On Air Time display tells you how long the scene has been on the air.
Each time a tweet is shown, the played counter is incremented. A tweet that hasn't been shown would have a played value of 0. Played counter can be reset from the Actions menu. When getting new tweets from the database (using the Get Tweets button/menu item), only unplayed tweets can be retrieved if the "Unplayed only" checkbox is checked. If the "Unplayed at top" checkbox is checked, the order of tweets has unplayed first followed by oldest to newest. If "Unplayed at top" isn't checked, the order is always oldest to newest.
The following functionality is available in the TweetOut Mini Player:
- The Mini Player application can be on top of other applications. This is done from the menu item File->Top Most Window
- The mini player's output layer can be forced offline on hide using menu item File->Scene Offline on Hide
- Enable the Auto option to automatically iterate through Tweets. Once the last Tweet is played, the TweetOut Mini Player retrieves the Tweets again from the Flow database and continues to play from the top of the list. This feature can be very useful for topics where Tweets are changing rapidly.
- Enable the Loop option to loop through the topic or playlist. When enabled, Loop goes back to the first Tweet after showing the last Tweet in the grid. If Loop is cleared, the TweetOut Mini Player stops showing Tweets after it iterates once through the list.
- The Read option is used in combination with Loop. Enable the Read option to refresh the Tweets on each loop cycle. Clear the Read option to only loop the same Tweets without refreshing.
- Use the Action > Clear Played options to clear the played flag for playlists and topics
- if avatars aren't required, Get Tweets can skip downloading them. This greatly improves the time it takes to download tweets to the Mini Player.
