Introducing Britney
Britney usually acts as a display server that can be adminstrated locally or remotely via a simple, browser-based interface. Individual screens can be composed based on images, movies, slideshows or text. Multiple screens together form a playlist, that can be selected for screening. The structure of Britney is quite simple, what makes for an almost zero training curve for content producers to handle the system.
Basic procedure: Content composed for screens, which in turn form a playlist.
Birtney as such is not an editing suite for movies and images. The content available for composing the screens has to be prepared in advance, and uploaded to a place where it becomes accessible and indexable. Once imported, all content items can be freely placed across multiple screens and are generally reusable. The variety of input formats is quite extensive. Regarding movies, most standard formats such as mpeg, mp4 or avi codecs are supported. Moreover it can deal with Macromedia Flash files and most images formats. A special type is available for directories of images in order to import whole galleries and ease the handling of pictures from digital camera. An additional gimmick is the ability to include presentation slides from Apples Keynote.
Running a britney is straight forward, since it fully relies on web standards for administration as well as for displaying content. All depending components are open sourced and the system itself plays well together with external applications, such as a content management system. A single instance of britney manages to feed multiple clients with playlists and content. Again due to its webbased approach, playout stations or clients can be placed quite autonomosly as long as there is a reliable network connection available. Consequently Britney also runs on a standalone system that hosts both, the web client and the server.
Britney was developed from an emerged need of the etoy.CORPORATION. A collective of people from various backgrounds was supposed to continuously produce content that could be immediately displayed in public. By the time, the superordinated focus of an instant composing-, and displaysystem shiftet towards an utmost diversity of input sources and flexibility in composing screens. There has never been a lack of ideas about how to enhance Britney with additional features ...