Accounting

Description

The accounting / "proof of play" feature is commonly used for providing evidence of displaying advertising media. On the SpinetiX platform, this is done in two steps:

1. Enable proof of play in Elementi / HMD / Fusion for one or more media resources.
2. Retrieve the accounting.log from the HMP.

Enable proof of play

To mark a resource (media or SVG file) within an Elementi / HMD project, for being logged in the accounting.log file, follow these steps:

1. Open the project within Elementi / HMD.
2. Open the document that contains that resource.
3. Open the layer properties of that resource by clicking on the button ("Layer Properties").
   • For HMD, click on the three-dot button and then on "More...".
4. Enable the option "Proof of play" (respectively, "Tag for accounting" in HMD).
   • This adds a special attribute to the element which indicates to the player that opening and closing of this media file must be logged into the accounting file.
5. Click on the OK button.
6. Save your project and publish it onto the HMP.

Within Fusion, you cannot mark individual media for accounting, nevertheless, you can enable proof of play for all the media in a Fusion playlist. Alternatively, you can create a hypermedia project, load the media files into it, mark them for accounting and then upload that project into Fusion.

Accounting.log

The accounting.log provides a records list of when the media elements (that were marked for accounting) of your project were opened and closed by the HMP.

• It can be retrieved from "Logs" page of Control Center or using other methods.
• Since it's a text format file (tab delimited), it can easily be imported into a spreadsheet (e.g. Microsoft Excel). It can also be used as a data source for more advanced usage, like parsing scripts, databases, web reporting applications, accounting applications etc.
• Note that the records are not influenced by the state of the attached screen - meaning that the resources will still be logged even if the screen is not switched on.
• The accounting log is rotated every 24h, like all other logs. See Logs maintenance for more details.

Log format

The format of the accounting.log is (this header is not actually added to the file!):

Datetime Event Resource Type Duration

• Event = the event type, can be "Open" or "Close";
• Resource = the resource that is being logged, including the path to it;
• Type = the resource type, can be "image/svg+xml", "video/mpeg", "video/quicktime", "video/x-msvideo" etc.;
• Duration = the playing time in seconds.

Each time the media is opened a line like this will be added to the log file:

2008/05/05 23:17:10 Open spx://localserver/MyVideo.avi video/x-msvideo

Each time the media is closed a line like this will be added to the log file (there's an extra tab before the last column):

2008/05/05 23:17:13 Close spx://localserver/MyVideo.avi	3.5