Elementi playlist

 

This page is about Elementi's playlist feature. The information below may not apply for versions older than Elementi 2018.

Introduction

An Elementi playlist is a collection of slides that are displayed sequentially or in shuffled order. A slide can be anything from basic content like rich text, image, video, audio, real-time streaming media, web page or more complex content such as layout, (non-looping) playlist, schedule, widget. A playlist can be created as a single file (i.e., master playlist) or as a collection, and it can include both local and remote resources.

Usually playlists are set to loop, meaning that once the last slide has finished playing, the first slide will automatically start. For a nicer effect between each slide, a transition can be selected.

Any number of playlists can be created within a project and each can be used in various ways:

• as a slide inside another playlist;
• as a layer inside a layout, including the main index file of the project;
• as a media event inside an Elementi schedule.

To add a playlist into an opened document, simply drag and drop the playlists either into the Edit panel or into the Preview panel.

Starting with Elementi 2015, it is easy to work with playlists of large videos and images in multiscreen projects – simply create a playlist covering the desired area, and then drag & drop the multiscreen images and/or multiscreen videos into the playlist.

Elementi 2021 added the capability to handle PDF files, including features for importing multipage PDFs as playlists and managing their individual pages.

There are also some other playlist widgets that extend the basic playlist functionality, such as:

• Built-in data-driven widgets: Media Playlist, Animated Playlist, and Slideshow
• Add-ons: interactive playlist widgets and Playlist of scheduled media widget

Create a playlist

To create a new playlist, follow these steps:

1. Create a new Elementi project or open an existing one.
2. Click the Menu → File → New Playlist... option (Shift+ Ctrl + N) on the toolbar.
   • You can also right-click on an empty space inside the Browse panel and select the "New Playlist..." option from the contextual menu.
3. In the "New Playlist" dialog that opens, set the playlist properties as detailed below.
   • If needed, click the "Create a master playlist" option to create a master playlist, instead of a playlist collection.
4. Click the "OK" button.

Playlist types

Master playlist

A master playlist is a single SVG file, named according to the user preference, and is recommended for playing multiple full-screen layouts or when its items are remote or shared between different project components. Note that its icon is automatically updated based on the content upon each save.

Playlist collection

Playlist collection is a special type of collection, marked with the blue icon on the right, and is recommended for grouping all playlist resources together, which makes it easier to reuse the playlist in other projects. The collection gets the name entered by the user, and a playlist.svg file in automatically included within the playlist collection. This is the default option when creating a new playlist in Elementi.

To open the playlist, double-click on the blue folder icon in the Browse panel. If there's nothing else currently opened in Preview panel, the playlist.svg file is automatically opened. Otherwise, double-click on the playlist.svg file to open it for editing and previewing.

PDF playlist

When importing a PDF file with multiple pages into Elementi 2021 or later, a distinct folder (see its icon on the left side) is created containing both the original PDF file and a special playlist widget (named "pages.svg") having each page as a separate item (media layer). The PDF playlist allows you to change the order of the pages, or toggle their visibility with the radio button under the "Show" column.

 

For more details, see the dedicated article about using PDF content.

Playlist properties

When creating a new playlist, the following parameters can be configured:

• Name

  Enter the name of the playlist (used either for the playlist folder name or the playlist file name).

• Transition

  Click the button to open the "Transition Properties" dialog and select the transition effect to use for the playlist items.

  Random transitions or shuffling must be avoided for multiscreen content, because the randomisation is done by each player with different results.

• Shuffle

  Select whether the items are played in the order they were entered in the playlist (checkbox not ticked; default value) or in a random order (checkbox ticked).

  If enabled, the shuffle is done when the playlist document is opened, thus if "Looping" is enabled, the shuffle is done only once.

• Looping

  Select whether all the playlist items are played only once (checkbox not ticked) or in a continuous loop (checkbox ticked; default value).

  Note that even though this property is disabled, the playlist might still appear to loop when it is included into a layout by a layer that is set to repeat indefinitely.

• Media duration

  Enter the default duration to use for media items without a intrinsic duration, like images or text items.

  Video items are usually not influenced by this property as their natural duration is used by default.

• Create a master playlist (previously "Create only SVG file")

  Select whether the new playlist would be a playlist collection (checkbox not ticked) or a master playlist (checkbox ticked).

  By default, this option is disabled which means that a playlist collection is created.

Note:

To modify the playlist properties afterwards, open the playlist and click on button from the toolbar - this opens the "Document Properties" dialog, which allows modifying the transition, shuffle, looping, and media duration properties.

Add content to the playlist

After the new playlist is created, the next step is to add some content into it.

1. If a playlist collection is created, double-click on its blue icon in Browse panel to open it. If there's nothing else currently opened in preview panel, the playlist.svg file is automatically opened. Otherwise,
2. Double-click on the (master) playlist.svg file to open it for editing and previewing.
3. To add media slides - could be a common media file (image, video, audio) or an Elementi media (layout, another (non-looping) playlist, widget) - into the playlist :
   1. If needed, import some images and / or videos - to do so, drag and drop the files from Windows Explorer into the Browse panel.
   2. Drag & drop the media files from the Browse panel into the Edit panel.
4. To add text slides to the playlist, click the "Add Text Layer" button from the toolbar.
5. To fine tune the slide properties, click the button next to it to open the Layer Properties dialog.

Note:

See also more details about editing playlist items within the Edit panel.

Duration of playlist items

Edit panel > Playlist tab

The duration of each playlist item is shown on the Edit panel next to the item thumbnail. When adding a new slide to the playlist, Elementi automatically computes its duration based on the item type and its properties, as following:

• For static items, like images and text, the item duration is set to the default media duration configured on the playlist properties. The keyword "Default" is added before the duration to mark this.
• For videos, their natural duration is used by default.
• For layouts with a fixed duration, that duration is used, otherwise the default media duration is used.
• For non-looping playlists, the total playlist duration is used, otherwise the default media duration is used.
• For data-driven widgets, the duration cannot be calculated upfront as that depends on the widget configuration and the length of the set retrieved from the data source.
  • If the widget has a fixed duration then that duration is used.
  • If the widget is not set to loop, then the item duration is set to "Play once", which means that all the widget slides will be played once, then the playlist will advance to the next item.
  • Otherwise the default media duration is used.

The duration of any playlist item can be manually set to a certain duration - for that, follow these steps:

1. Click the button to open the Layer Properties dialog for that item.
2. Select "Specify" radio button next to "Duration".
3. Enter a time duration as a number (of seconds) or by using the "HH:MM:SS" format.

Note:

If you have a non-looping data-driven widget included into a layout and you drag that into a playlist, the slide duration is set to the default media duration - although the "Play once" option is there, it cannot be used because the layout doesn't automatically close when the inner widget ends. For such cases, you need to include the widget directly into the playlist.

Include the playlist into the project

The final part is to include the playlist into the Elementi project:

1. In the Browse panel, click on the project name inside the navigation bar to go back to the root of the project.
2. Double click on the index.svg file to open it.
3. Drag and drop the playlist from the Browse panel into either the Preview panel or the Edit panel.
4. Adjust the size and position of the playlist within the Preview panel.
5. Save the changes.

Video tutorials

Media playlist for a hotel

Watch the video below to learn how to:

• Organize your images and videos into a playlist
• Customize their order of appearance
• Schedule their duration on the screen.

Simple playlist of images

Here is another video about how to create a simple playlist of images within a project:

Two-layout master playlist

The video below shows how to create a master playlist containing two Elementi layouts.

See also:

Create a master playlist tutorial for further details about this subject.

Troubleshooting

• You get this message: The playlist is set to loop and its total duration cannot be determined; using the playlist within a schedule or a multiscreen project might cause problems. or Playlist is looping inside a schedule but does not meet the conditions to be synchronized

  The alert message is usually displayed when the playlist is included into a multiscreen project or a schedule file, the playlist is set to loop and its total duration cannot be determined (e.g., one of the items doesn't have a fixed duration) - in which case, it may cause synchronization problems. The solution is to disable the playlist's looping property and / or make sure that all the media items within have fixed durations.

  Other possible cases:

  • When using external images for which the URI doesn't include the image extension; the solution in this case is to specify the image mime-type under Layer properties > Advanced tab by setting the attribute type to image/png, image/jpeg or image/gif.
  • When dragging the project timeline marker or making any changes on the playlist after one hour of playing time; the message can be ignored in this case.

• When testing the data source for a data-driven widget included into a playlist, an "Operation Failed" error might be returned. The workaround for this issue is to open the widget directly. This is a regression introduced in 4.2.0 release.

See also

• Elementi
• Create a master playlist
• Create a video playlist
• Multiscreen playlist
• Elementi layout
• Elementi schedule
• Content Playlist for the built-in playlist feature of DiVA, HMP300, and HMP350 devices.
• Media playlist widgets
• Interactive playlist widgets
• Playlist of scheduled media widget