Playing content from a USB stick on an Edge 340

Question

Is it possible to have an Edge 300 or 340 play content from a USB stick?  This works on DMP 4310s but wondering if this is possible with an Edge device?  Have a customer that uses digital signs but can't always have network connectivity so places video content on a USB stick to play through the DMP without network connectivity.
Thanks
John

Answer 1

Hi,
Note: The 4310 itself has had a significant API overhaul in the latest firmware release.
Now, the Cisco Edge has its own set of APIs, see FAQ at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/video/edge-340-digital-media-player/q-and-a-c67-729672.html
Some of the native API is documented here but its mostly system management commands:
http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/cisco_edge_340/software/release/1_0/configuration/guide/340cg_en.pdf
The 340 is pretty much a regular Fedora 16 Linux system, it runs binaries and RPMs from that release (it can be tricky because the installed ones have edge340 in the package name, this wreaks havoc on dependencies so I'm trying to stick with static vs linked binaries and not mess with the stock RPM database) so you can modify it to do anything Linux can do.
One example that would not break your setup or modify it: You can SCP content to the local flash storage (or a USB stick if you wish) and remotely issue a VLC command line via ssh to play that local media in full screen mode. We have been experimenting with playing multicast video URLs in this manner by providing a multicast address and port on the command line.
Since as I mentioned, it's just a Linux box, I have a prototype I've updated to a later version of VLC than what was included so it's hard for me to say "oh, this works great" because mine isn't stock anymore. I've also hacked it to do Airplay (apple) mirroring from my iPhone or Macbook Pro for example.
(Just don't nuke the restore partition on the flash media. I have had to roll it back to stock once or twice.)
Our BU (we're an end user of the 340) has done various things on the 340 like emulating the 4310's api with a java daemon that responds to similar commands. I don't know if this is fully complete or an approach we're moving forward with. I think we only need to emulate a small portion of the legacy 4310 commands. But it's another example of the versatility of the 340, whereas on the 4310 with its sigmatel processor, I had a lot of trouble compiling useful binaries that would execute on it for various troubleshooting and QA activity.
I only bring some of these points up because the 340 may be an interesting and useful endpoint for other vendors who may wish to evaluate and use our product in other ways than just the Appspace route.