I have Screenly OSE installed on a Rpi4 last week, and added a published Google slides as asset. It was working perfectly fine until this morning. If I add other websites to the asset list (including the original URL of the Google Slides), they show up fine. But when it’s the published Google slide’s turn, the screen just turns black.
I’ve tried re-adding the asset, re-imaging Rpi Lite, and re-adding Screenly OSE.
Reproduction Steps
Steps to reproduce this issue, eg:
Publish a Google Slideshow, and use tinyurl to shorten the URL
Unfortunately Google rolled out an update that broke this for a lot of digital signage players. We have addressed this on the commercial version, but are yet to fix this for OSE.
We essentially need to disable garbage collection in WebEngine to restore this.
Would be great if screenly allowed PDF-as-slideshow. Then you could download your google presentation as a PDF and upload that instead. No more google whackamole.
In the short term, I gave up on Screenly. I’m booting the GUI version of Raspberry Pi OS and using this file (path below) to launch the Chromium browser and ‘play’ the Google Presentation. I’m fortunate to have just one Presentation to show.
/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart
A little searching will reveal the command line options to specify kiosk mode and the URL of your published presentation.
It is still broken. If you add the edit form of a slide as an asset, the page only partially loads and you get the warning station that the browser version is no longer supported. apt update/upgrade doesn’t help. The only thing I can’t fully rule out is upgrading to the beta version, but last time I tried, it bricked our Pi. We’re looking into a non-screenly option now. Since it appears this won’t be resolved, at the very least for longer than we are willing to wait.
The work around I’ve been able to do is to download the Google Slide as a PowerPoint, open it in PowerPoint then Export > Create a video. Choose Full HD (1080p), set the timing for all the slides (we’re just using 5 seconds on each), and Create Video. Then upload that file to Screenly and it will work. Not the best solution if you are constantly updating your Google Slide, but at least it’ll get you up and running again.
We ended up scrapping screenly and hodgepodging our own solution, though not as smoothly as screenly is “supposed” to work.
We installed the base PiOs, modified the startup script to launch chromium full screen, published our slides presentation to the web, and used that link with the auto start/auto restart variables with a defined auto advance interval to present our slides. The only issue is that as we update the slides, the Pi Display won’t reflect the changed until the chromium tab is refreshed. Since we don’t updated our slides that often, we just set our Pi to auto reboot every morning which loads the most recent data when Chromium launches.
I don’t fully understand this, as i have Pi4s and 3s with older installs of Screenly that still run the slideshow no problem… So I’m guessing the issue relates to a specific version of OSE only.