Scheduled Content Is Not Playing | easyCMS Digital Signage

You built a layout, scheduled it, and the screen ignores it. There is a defined set of reasons this happens, and working through them in order will find yours in a few minutes.

The five conditions

Before a layout plays, the player checks that:

It is fully downloaded: the layout and every image, video, font and dataset it depends on.
Nothing it depends on is blacklisted: the player marks media it could not render so it does not retry forever.
Now falls inside the event window: including the correct day, and the correct time in the right timezone.
Nothing outranks it: a higher-priority event on the same display wins.
The layout parses cleanly: no empty regions, no invalid widgets.

Fail any one and the layout is skipped without an on-screen error. Fail all of them and you get the default layout or the splash screen.

Where to look first

Open the player’s status window on the device. It groups layouts into scheduled, valid and invalid. A layout that is scheduled but not valid names the problem for you, usually an incomplete download or a blacklisted file. See Reading the Player Status Window and Logs.

Common causes and fixes

The previous layout has not finished

easyCMS finishes the layout that is playing before switching. A layout containing a long video will overrun a short event entirely. Shorten the item, or extend and prioritise the new event.

Priority is doing something you did not intend

Priority is per-event. A recurring “always on” event left at a high priority will quietly suppress everything you schedule afterwards. Open the Schedule in agenda view for that display and read what is genuinely active at the moment you care about, it is far more reliable than reading the calendar grid.

The event was scheduled to the wrong target

Events attach to a display, a display group, or all displays. Scheduling to a group the display is not a member of is an easy mistake, especially after someone reorganises groups. Check the display’s group membership.

Dayparting and timezone

If you use dayparts, or the display sits in a different timezone from your account, read Timezones, Dayparting and Schedule Accuracy. The “Run at CMS time” option is the usual culprit, with it off, the event follows the player’s local clock, which is often not what people expect.

A blacklisted file

If one video in a playlist is unplayable on that device, the whole layout can be marked invalid. The status window lists blacklisted media IDs. Replace or re-encode the file, see Videos Will Not Play or Stutter, then clear the blacklist entry for the display from its row menu in easyCMS.

Empty regions

A region with nothing in it, or with a widget whose data source returned nothing, can invalidate the layout. Open the layout in the designer, check every region has content, and look for the layout status indicator before publishing.

You forgot to publish

Layouts edited in the designer stay in draft until published. Draft changes never reach a player. Check the layout is Published and that the schedule points at the published version.

Test in the fastest possible loop

To sanity-check the whole chain, use Schedule Now on the display with a simple layout containing one image, at high priority, for 10 minutes. If that appears, your plumbing is fine and the problem is in the original layout or event. If it does not, the problem is downloads or connectivity, go to Display is Online but Content Never Changes.