Hyper Media Director

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Discontinued product since January 2014.
SpinetiX no longer offers technical support for this software.
Recommended replacement: Elementi.
See how to upgrade from HMD to Elementi.

Introduction

Hyper Media Director ("HMD") is a commercial software application from SpinetiX which helps you to create digital signage projects, publish these projects on Hyper Media Players and manage your network of HMP devices.

The first version of HMD was released in January 2007; the latest stable version of Hyper Media Director is version "Jungfrau" 2.2.7, released on 18 Nov 2013 - for more details, see HMD release notes.

Downloads

Hyper Media Director installer
Version: 2.2.7
Release date: 18 Nov 2013
HMD Product Brief
Revision 7.2
HMD User Manual
Revision Nov 2011

Features

All the features of Hyper Media Director are detailed in the HMD User Manual; the main HMD features are:

Languages

HMD is currently translated in the following languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and (Simplified) Chinese. These are installed by default within the main application and the language will be selected automatically based on your system settings.

  • If HMD is starting in the wrong language, please check in Windows Control Panel > Region and Language, that "Format" is set appropriately - often system have the location set correctly, but not the format locale.

Editions

  • There are two editions of HMD: Lite (also referred to as "Standard") and Professional (also referred to as "Pro");
  • The installer for both editions is identical, the features available to each edition are determined on the license activated within the software. To switch from one edition to another, just enter the new license key and activate it (there's no need to re-download or to reinstall HMD).
  • Only one instance of HMD can be installed on a computer concurrently and that instance will be available to all the users registered on that computer.

HMD Lite

  • HMD Lite is the edition obtained by default after running the HMD installer.
  • Management of a maximum of 10 devices.
  • It contains all the features, except the "Pro" ones (read the HMD User Guide for more details).

HMD Professional

HMD Professional has more features than HMD Lite, like:

Licensing

See the full article on the HMD license page.

Any version of HMD must be activated before it can be used.

Projects

See the full article on the Project page.

The projects are grouped under My Projects collection, which appears in the browsing area of HMD (when you open HMD and / or create a new tab). After opening My Projects, you can access several actions by right-clicking the browsing panel:

  • New Project.
  • New Collection (to organize your projects in functional groups).
  • Copy, Paste, Delete etc.
  • Archive (to create a 7z compressed file with your project - useful for back-up or for uploading it into Fusion).
  • Set type (to change the target HMP of your project)

System requirements

Operating Systems

  • PC Operating System: Windows XP (SP3), Vista (SP1), Windows 7.
    • Windows Server operating systems are not supported, but may work (see the notes below).
    • Other operating systems, like MAC OS or Linux OS are not supported.
    • Virtual machines are strongly not recommended mostly for performance reasons.
    • Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 are supported (HMD is a 32-bit application, but it runs on both versions of Windows).

Recommended Hardware

  • Pentium 4 / AMD Athlon or newer processor that supports SSE2.
  • 512MB of RAM.
  • 200MB of hard drive space for installing the application.
  • Graphic card with support for DirectX 9.0c or later.
  • The specifications required to run HMD depend heavily on the content of your project. If you are running a project with multiple videos, for example, HMD will not be able to render smoothly if your PC is not capable of playing multiple videos independently.

Notes for Windows Server and terminal services:

  • Windows Server 2008 has a known issue with Powerpoint conversion whereby the Powerpoint Viewer crashes on startup.
  • Many Servers have very limited graphics capability and poor DirectX support. If you see errors such as "D3D9 Backend not used" when starting HMD, change the "Viewer Backend" under the HMD Settings menu to "Image", to avoid repeated messages. Performance will be less than optimal.
  • Terminal services, Citrix and VNC are technically compatible with HMD but often graphics acceleration is not available with such software so the experience will be less-than-optimal, especially when using complex graphics and video.

Notes for Mac OS:

  • The Mac OS is not supported, however you can use Boot Camp (with or without Parallels Desktop) that lets you run compatible versions of Microsoft Windows on an Intel-based Mac.

External components

Bonjour

At the end of the HMD installation, two additional programs from Apple Inc. are installed: Apple Software Update and Bonjour.

  • These programs are installed as part of HMD and their installation cannot be skipped, nor the programs removed afterwards. Otherwise HMD will not going to work.
  • If needed, you can disable the Bonjour Service afterwards from your system services console - in this case device discovery will stop working.

PPT2SVG

PPT2SVG is a command-line tool supplied with HMD and used for importing SWF and Powerpoint (PPT & PPTX) files. Due to licensing restrictions it is not available to be installed separately from HMD, however you can use this application command line version (found in the Program Files folder where HMD is installed) without activating HMD.

Troubleshooting HMD

See also the troubleshooting sections for: HMD Templates, Device discovery, Projects.

Finding logs and config files

HMD stores the logs, configuration files, streaming captures and crash dump files in the 'Local Application Data' folder under your user account folder (hidden by default). This folder can also be located running the following command: shell:Local AppData\SpinetiX\HMD

  • Alternatively you can use %LOCALAPPDATA%\SpinetiX\HMD in Vista/Win7 or %APPDATA%\Local\SpinetiX\HMD in XP.

Errors

  • Error: <file name> is not a valid Windows Executable.
    • The executable is corrupt, usually by a broken download from spinetix.com. Clear your browser's cache and download again.
  • Error after installation of new version: "The procedure entry point raptor_parse_chunk could not be located in the dynamic link library libraptor.dll."
    • The old version of HMD has not been properly uninstalled, and some older files have been left in the Program Files folder.
    • Uninstall any and all versions of HMD, delete everything in the \Program files\SpinetiX\HMD folder, then try installing HMD again.
  • "This application is going to terminate because of an unexpected error" - Unexpected crashes such as this can be caused by a number of issues. Please try the following steps before contacting support:
    • Ensure you are using the latest HMD version.
    • Ensure your PC is running the latest graphics drivers. The majority of HMD issues of this type are caused by graphics problems.
    • Note if a particular file or action causes the error consistently.
    • Temporarily change the resolution on your PC and see if this changes the frequency of the problem.
    • If your project is in a network location, copy the project to a local folder such as c:\temp
    • Run dxdiag.exe to check that you are using DirectX 9.0c. Press the "Save all information" button and send this file to support, along with the crash.dmp file which is located in the folder %LOCALAPPDATA%\SpinetiX\HMD\ (if using XP: "%AppData%\Spinetix\HMD")
  • "The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more details." - this is due to a conflict with other Microsoft Visual C++ components already active on your system. Try to reinstall the HMD application and if that is not solving the issue, then you have to remove from your system the components that are causing the conflict (you can find those in the Windows application event log).
  • "hmd.exe - Unable To Locate Component" and "This application has failed to start because dnssd.dll was not found ..." - this means that Bonjour is not correctly installed.
    • If reinstalling HMD doesn't fix the problem, then download and install the Bonjour Print Services standalone application from Apple website.
  • When entering a html web page URL as a source (in the URI field for media layer or as a feed source), nothing is displayed - please see Web content page for details.
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This page was last modified on 10 November 2022, at 18:33.