nu-its / exhibit

Exhibit is a managed screensaver App for tvOS.

Exhibit

Read the full documentation here.

Exhibit, previously known as "MDM Image Viewer", is a managed screensaver App for tvOS and a great alternative for conference rooms and public spaces where managed Apple TVs are locked to Conference Room Display mode. With Exhibit, you can customize the Apple TVs in your collaborative spaces by displaying curated images and videos to your users. The App also displays an AirPlay box similar to Conference Room Display mode so users can easily identify the device.

Features:

• Run the App in single App mode and automate your processes for a zero-touch deployment.
• Give content curators access to managing the background content playlist.
• Allow your Apple TV to double as digital signage and an AirPlay device.

Requirements:

• Apple TV with tvOS 12 or higher
• A Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution such as Jamf.
• App Deployment through an MDM with required Managed App Config.

Sample Screenshot:

exhibit's Issues

Airplay screen flickers

I have tested running some clips by putting them as exhibit in csv file. While the media is loaded and running well in tvOS 15.1.1, users found that the airplay is intermittently disrupted by flickers.

Delayed content load when locked into Single App Mode

Issue with content loading after a reboot of an Apple TV with Exhibit locked into Single App Mode. It seems that content loaded is delayed or never loads upon reboot. When Single App Mode profile is removed and re-added, the Exhibit reloads and displays content properly. It seems to take various amounts of time to load the content.

I am currently unable to debug with Xcode as console logging stops working properly when Apple TV is locked into Single App Mode.

Youtube, Spotify, media content forces disconnect when using exhibit with video content

Hey,

thanks for this wonderful app. Sadly we have a big problem. We show a videofile on 80 AppleTVs with Exhibit and Airplay is working normally. But if one will share content from YouTube, Spotify or other media content, Airplay disconnects immediately. This happens very often.
After disabling Single App and enabling conference mode, everything works fine. Changing back to Exhibit with a videofile, sharing media content through Airplay lead to disconnects again.
Can you confirm this problem and please solve it at best.

Here you can find our video. Our students love this background, if the AppleTVs aren't in use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9c_7fQkX-8

Thanks for all, regards
Peer Jansen

customizable onscreen text

Thank you first for this excellent app. It works perfect. It also allows us to disable the Auto Sleep feature, which has always been causing problems for our students and teachers.

Feature Request:
For use on our school campus in germany the text in the AirPlay box is not optimal.
A very useful new feature would be an onscreen text customizable via app configuration profile or csv.

It would be great if you could integrate this feature in the next version.

Best regards
Sven Zimmermann

slideshow support - enhancement request

would love to see support for viewing the pages of a single PDF or PPT file rather than defining various separate images

Feature Request: defaultdataURLFallback key

It would be great to set a fallback dataURL key that is used if the dataURL key is either a) not present OR b) the underlying csv does not exist. This would allow overrides for specific AppleTVs csvs name as $DEVICENAME.csv

Apple TV Goes Into Standby - tvOS 15.x

After a period of time (30 ish minutes) if you try to cast to the ATV it will go into standby mode. It's only been since version 15 of tvOS, still works fine on 14.7 with no issues.

important information is missing in documentation

Hello everyone :)

I desperately try to configure the app via apple-profilemanager mdm. But it keeps demanding an valid configuration.
So I think, my .plist-File is not valid AND/OR the "Paket-ID" is wrong.

Could you add the missing information to the documentation?
That would be great :)
Best regards,
Jesko

Quotation marks in CSV result in failure to load

Many apps/tools that write CSV files (such as fputcsv in PHP) will put quotation marks around any value containing a space, like the date/time values Exhibit requires in its playlist. However, Exhibit will not work from a CSV file containing quotation marks. It will become stuck on the "loading" screen.

mdm-image-viewer no longer on App Store

Its too sad, but mdm-image-viewer seems to be no longer on app store.
Can we expect to get it back? What can we do?

Issue with app crashing and white screen

We are having an issue with the Exhibit app crashing on an Apple TV on ATV HD's and 4k's. We have a fleet of Apple TV's facing a very similar issue both between TvOS 13 & TvOS 14. When the Apple TV's were in single app mode, we were facing an issue where the Exhibit app appeared to crash and display a white screen. When this white screen appears, the AirPlay functionality became disabled. When the Single App Mode profile is removed, when manually entering the Exhibit mode the app crashed and we are booted back to the TV home screen

Request

Add photo caching for offline AppleTV installs (time permitting, of course).

Effectively this is the workflow:

Provision AppleTV with Exhibit and other config profiles from MDM.

Allow Exhibit to pull config csv from HFS repo and cache the photos from the csv into app memory.

Remove AppleTV from the network to allow for Exhibit to work without a network connection using cached photos.

Another possibility:

Allow end users to replace the default Exhibit static photo with a custom photo by specifying a URL for caching in the app config file rather than having to point the config to a CSV.

Live webpage and HTML content

It would be very useful if Exhibit allowed the loading and displaying of HTML and webpages allowing there to be live updating information.

Improvement on error message "There was an issue loading the player content".

Hi guys,

First things first, thank you for that app that we are using in our school.

Just a small improvement request coming from my Tech Support.

We have many people from outside the school who when they turn on the digital boards see the following alert message "xxx" that appears after the Apple TV is turned on, while it connects and the images load.

Unfortunately, some worried users contact the technical support for help.

My request would be to simply change this message so that it is less disturbing, for example "Please wait a few moments...".

Source availability/open to PRs?

Was looking for the source code to add an optional title to each image but it seems that it's closed source (source was removed at be66826). Any chance you would open the source and accept PRs?

(Side note: if its not open source you may want to change the LICENSE)

Data URL issue

Hey guys,
Not sure if im doing g something wrong here, but getting the DATA url issue.
Assume the .mobileconfig file is wrong.
Can you also upload a sample .mobileconfig file for reference.
thanks!

Is there a way to use Google Slides?

Looking for a way to add an extremely user friendly way to add a Google Slides presentation, if at all possible. Tried just adding a link to the presentation to the spreadsheet, but that didn't work

jamf disable movements of the AirPlay box

Hi guys, is it possible to disable the movements of the airplay box in jamf?
actually my jamf setup looks like https://imgur.com/smaqiXK
thank you and best regards from germany

Host Name no longer populating in tvOS 16.0 (20J373)

Hello,

Before tvOS 16 the host name set for an AppleTV would correctly populate and display. Post tvOS 16 the device name only shows "Apple TV" Confirmed this to occur on multiple devices and it persists after a full reset/wipe. Confirmed the device name is correct in the Apple TV settings.

I am going to assume this is some new privacy restriction, so I will see if there is a workaround, but if you all know of how to keep the device name correct that would be great!

Url issue.

Hi Guys,

First thanks a bunch for this really interesting utility. I'm facing issues, getting our playlist URL to feed our TV. I'm pretty sure the PLIST file is correctly written but it's still not addressing our playlist. Can you please kindly take a look at my PLIST?

<dict>
    <key>edu.nebraska.ImageViewer.dataType</key>
    <string>csv</string>
    <key>edu.nebraska.ImageViewer.dataURL</key>
    <string>https://raw.githubusercontent.com/teamlewis/Exhibit/main/master/Demo/Playlist</string>
    <key>edu.nebraska.ImageViewer.dataType</key>
    <string>csv</string>
    <key>edu.nebraska.ImageViewer.deviceName</key>
    <string>$DEVICENAME</string>
    <key>edu.nebraska.ImageViewer.defaultBackground</key>
    <string>DefaultBackgroundNoLogo</string>
</dict>

Thank you,
Best Regards
Iñaky