To configure Webconverger with an attraction screensaver, for example to tell potential users which services are on offer, you need to setup your homepage, the homepage you control, to do that.

This guide will run through a way to do this, by playing a video file after a period of inactivity.

This homepage should be tailored to your kiosk setup. Since you might not want your regular visitor's from home to see this screensaver.

How to make the videos, given JPEG slides

Using https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Create%20a%20video%20slideshow%20from%20images as a starting point.

Problem is ffmpeg will take the resolution of the first frame, then only encode identically-sized frames. The trick is to expand the image using imagemagick's extent function:

tmpdir=$(mktemp -d)
count=0
padtowidth=3
for p in *.jpg
do
    convert "$p" -gravity center -background black -extent 1440x1080  $tmpdir/$(printf "%0*d\n" $padtowidth $c).jpg
    c=$(($c + 1))
done
echo $c images
ffmpeg -r 1/10 -i $tmpdir/%03d.jpg -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4
rm -rf $tmpdir

The above code assumes an end resolution of 1440x1080.

How to make your homepage play the video after a period of inactivity

You need to introduce a modified piece of Javascript and source it, configuring:

  • the video file you want to play
  • the period of time for the timeout

Next you need to configure Webconverger with the security policy to allow the screensaver to play fullscreen, using the prefs API pointing to a code snippet that looks like:

Components.utils.import("resource://gre/modules/Services.jsm");
Components.utils.import("resource://gre/modules/NetUtil.jsm");
Services.perms.add(NetUtil.newURI("http://YOUR_HOMEPAGE_URL/"), "fullscreen", 1);
pref("full-screen-api.allow-trusted-requests-only", false);

Remember to replace YOUR_HOMEPAGE_URL.

How to update the screensaver

You should host the video file as an MP4 on your homepage URL, e.g. $homepage/attract.mp4

You simply update the video file on your homepage.

Background reading