Parameters & Device State
Open Players > select a player to manage it. The player card has several tabs: Parameters, Download status, CamGrabber, State, Frames, Criteria and Variables.
Parameters
| Row | Description |
|---|---|
Name |
Display name of the player. Click the pencil icon to rename inline. |
Controller ID |
UUID of the attached brightness controller device, if any (see Brightness & Visual Effects). |
Timezone |
Local timezone of the player. Controls when time-based schedules start and stop playback. |
Player resolution |
Visible and physical resolution in pixels. Change resolution lets you enter a new size or duplicate an existing player’s settings. Resolution determines which media files are compatible. |
Player type |
Fixed (stationary installation) or Mobile (GPS-equipped moving vehicle). |
Last seen online |
Timestamp of the last contact with the device — see Online, offline and last seen. Mobile players also show the last position change. |
Position on the map |
For fixed players — the installation point (click Relocate to move the pin or enter GPS coordinates). For mobile players — a route geofence polygon; the actual position updates automatically from the GPS sensor. |
PIN generation / Enter PIN |
Device pairing controls — see Connecting a Device. |
Reboot device |
Daily automatic reboot at a set local time; helps prevent player freezes. Offered only when the device reports rooted Android — otherwise the row shows "Not supported". |
Metadata |
Installation metadata: placing (indoor/outdoor), description, OTS, GRP, azimuth, altitude, floor and floor height, angle, physical size, side, installation photos. |
The Archive / Return from archive buttons in the top corner control the player lifecycle — see Archive and restore.
| The timezone set here must match the timezone configured on the device itself. A mismatch causes schedules to start and end at unexpected times. |
| For leased players the editing rows are hidden — the lessee sees parameters read-only. |
Online, offline and last seen
Three different facts stand behind the connectivity wording, and mixing them up is the usual reason somebody reports that "the platform says the player is online but the screen is black".
Last seen online is a heartbeat and nothing else. The player application pings the server on its own schedule; this timestamp holds the moment the last ping arrived. A player with an empty playlist, a half-finished content download or a dead LED panel goes on pinging exactly as before, so a fresh timestamp proves the device is reachable — not that anything reached the screen.
Online / Offline is worked out from that heartbeat each time it is shown. The players list and its Online filter count a player as online while it holds a live connection to the server or its last ping is recent. The badge on the player’s own pages is worked out in the browser from Last seen online alone and is deliberately more forgiving — it reads Online while the last ping is under fifteen minutes old and turns to Offline after that, so that a few missed check-ins are not reported as an outage.
Never connected is a third state rather than a shade of Offline: there is no recorded ping at all, because the device has not been paired or has never been switched on since it was. It is drawn in neutral grey on purpose — a newly created player is in this state legitimately, and an alarm colour on every new row teaches operators to ignore alarm colours.
The pages do not poll. Each carries an As of HH:MM stamp beside Refresh saying when the browser last asked the server, so a panel left open for an hour cannot be mistaken for a live one.
To find out what the player actually played, use the Last playback column of the players list and Ad Play Statistics. Contact and playback are independent facts and are recorded separately.
State
The State tab is the device’s report about itself. CS Play measures none of it: the player application sends this block on its own schedule, and the tab shows whatever arrived last.
Two stamps say how old the readings are, and they are not the same fact:
- Reported HH:MM
-
when the device last sent the block. On a player that has run unchanged for months, this stamp — and every figure beneath it — can be months old, even while the player is online right now.
- As of HH:MM
-
when the browser last asked the server. Press Refresh to ask again.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
Model / Hardware Info |
Device model, product string and hardware description as the device reports them. |
Operating system |
OS name and version. |
Kernel |
Kernel build. The first thing to ask for when diagnosing a Linux player. |
Number of cores / RAM |
CPU cores and installed memory. |
IP address |
The address the device had when it last reported — not necessarily its address now. |
Player version / QT player version / Library version |
Installed software component versions. |
Disk space |
Free and total disk space. Both figures or neither: a free-space number with nothing to compare it against is shown as not reported. |
Timezone |
The timezone the device believes it is in. Compare it with the Timezone parameter above — a mismatch here is what makes schedules start and end at the wrong hour. |
Root-user rights |
Whether the player application runs with root privileges (Android). This is what decides whether daily automatic reboot can be offered at all. |
Fields the device did not send read Not reported instead of disappearing. A gap in the report is itself diagnostic, and a hidden row hides the finding.
TV-class players add a second block: platform, brightness, volume, interface language, screen orientation and uptime. Uptime is the quickest way to tell a player that rebooted overnight from one that has been up since installation.
When there is no table at all, the wording distinguishes two situations that look alike:
-
This player has never connected — no contact has ever been recorded. That is an installation task, not an outage; see Connecting a Device.
-
No details reported yet — the player has been in contact but has never sent a hardware report. Older player versions do not send one at all.
Download status
The Download status tab shows the progress of content synchronization — which files the device has downloaded and what is still pending.
CamGrabber devices
The CamGrabber tab lists the grabbers attached to this player. It is available to administrator and partner accounts.
A grabber is not a setting inside CS Play. It is a separate device on site, running the CamGrabber application, pointed at the physical screen and paired to this player by PIN. Each row on the tab is one such device: its id, name, description, licence type and state, with the pairing, activation and deletion actions beside it. Registration, licences and photo-report settings are described in CamGrabber Photo Reports.
| CamGrabber produces still photographs of ad plays. |