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Default Playback Behavior
If you have not configured a Playback Order, Video Kiosk will play the contents of the Media Folder (the Content Loop) in the order of either the first playlist it finds or, if a playlist is not found, the media folder contents in alphabetical order by the full path name of each file.
If you have not configured a time for playback, Video Kiosk will play the contents of the Content Loop whenever Video Kiosk is running.
Controlling Playback Order
You can control the playback order of the contents of the media folder using the following methods:
- The filename or filename and path order
- Random Order
- A .pickone folder(s)
- A playlist
A playlist will take precedence over the other methods, so if you select a playlist, Video Kiosk will use the order contained in the .m3u8 playlist file.
Controlling playback order with Filename
When using wither Path sort order or File name excluding path sort order, Video Kiosk will play the media in alphabetic order (UTF8 order), which sorts numbers (0-9) before letters (a-z).
If you want to control sort order, we recommend you prepend file names with a 2-4 digit number for Video Kiosk to sort by.
Example:
In this example, there are 6 media assets, 3 videos clips from competitions and 3 images – 1 upcoming event poster image, 1 ad spot for the Pro Shop image and 1 schedule image. To intersperse the videos between the images, prepend the file names with number to control the sort order and choose filename as the sort order. The filenames would look like this:
001 pro-shop-spot.png 002 brandon-fight-clip.mp4 003 mike-boxing-102.png 004 david-fight-clip.mp4 005 pma-schedule-fall-2015.png 006 robert-fight-clip.mp4
The prepended numbers make the sort order easy to understand and easy to see.
Random order playback
To use random order playback, follow these steps:
- Configure Video Kiosk with a sort order.
Go to Video Kiosk Settings > File and Folder > Sort by and set the order to Random shuffle
Controlling playback order with a Pick One folder
Video Kiosk recognizes the special folder extension, .pickone, and will select just one of the files in that (sub-)folder (in a round robin fashion) each time it plays the content loop.
To use a Pick One folder, follow these steps:
- Create a folder (or number of folders), using the extension, .pickone, and put the media you want to play in the folder(s).
- Put the folders in the media folder.
Video Kiosk will select one file to play from each .pickone folder each time it plays the media loop.
There are more options you can use when configuring a sort order. For more information, refer to the Video Kiosk User’s Manual.
