Tech Talk

How often do you reboot your fridge?

As most of our customers know, EnQii's Media Players are not just computers. Like your PVR or fridge, they are appliances. This means, rather than having to "manage" them, you can simply turn them on and off, and they do the rest. This kind of stand-alone ability is core to EnQii's technologies, and is very important in keeping the cost of your network down. This enables EnQii to deliver networks with lowest total cost of ownership.

How do EnQii players achieve their level of reliability?

First, EnQii selects media players that are suitable for the purpose. While they are well-priced, they are rugged, can stand the expected load, and are based on reliable components that can provide years of trouble-free player performance. Selected players have specialized components on board that help guarantee their reliability, such as temperature sensors, allowing warnings if a unit should overheat, and hardware "watchdogs", that can as a "last resort" detect if a unit has hung up. In addition, reboot that unit without any human intervention if necessary.

Second, EnQii bases the software on a very stable, reliable and integrated Operating System, and writes its software as a tightly integrated unit. Rather than "a PC with various stand-alone (and possibly conflicting) applications," EnQii's players are integrated to do exactly what they should do, and they do it very well. The Operating System is "thin", and the applications are all designed to work together. That also means an EnQii player always gets the most out of the available hardware.

Finally, we add enormous levels of "high availability" redundancy and safety to the players, as well as sophisticated diagnostics. Several software "watchdogs" and additional levels of redundancy make the EnQii player into what we call a "Mars Lander" that uses multiple strategies to keep playing without intervention. All the user has to do is turn the player on. The player checks itself, works around problems, and even reboots itself if it feels that would help solve a problem.

For all this simplicity, there is of course a lot of flexibility as well. The player supports many modes and settings. Using a simple web interface, the RemoteTransfer Settings Editor allows you to tune a wide range of functions and settings for one, many or all of your players at once. These settings go from network settings to usability settings such as the connect frequency to even the player's screen resolution, so that if you replace the screen, you do not need to go on-site to run setup programs.

All this is available in every 700-series EnQii Media Player. The current software, version 2.96, which was recently released, enhances the reliability and the level of watchdogs even further. This upgrade is available free of charge to all current users - your EnQii support professional can tell you more.

The future is even more exciting. The new generation of players will offer more abilities for simultaneous playback (up to 16 windows of video), multiple scrolling RSS feeds, multiple platform support, and even more intelligent data distribution. In doing so, EnQii players will remain at the forefront of Digital Signage technology, and will more than ever help your company visibly benefit from this technology.

If you will excuse the pun.


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