Content management in CODA

Telling CODA about your content and arranging it into playlists.

The user interface overview

This is the Content Management pane of the CODA website interface. It is here that you add and organise your content. On the left is the Library column, which shows a list of your Playlists. In the main part of the pane you can see an icon-based view of all of your sources (or, if a playlist is selected on the left, the entries in that playlist, shown in the order of which they are to be played). The icons will, if possible, be shown as a thumbnail preview, and if not, then as an icon representing the type of source - for a full description of the icons and what they mean see the Content Formats page. As your content library grows larger, you may want to find particular items quickly. You can find an item by typing part of its name into the search box at the bottom of the pane, and you can show only sources of a particular type by using the pull-down 'Type' selector. The other buttons at the bottom let you select the ordering of your sources in the display - either alphanumerically, or in reverse chronological order (so the newer items appear first) - and switch between an icon-based view (as shown above) and a list view.

Adding new sources

You can add new sources by clicking on the ADD button in the bottom right of the view. You have four main options when adding new sources:
  • Upload to CODA - your files are stored on our servers where they can only be accessed by your CODA hardware.
  • Bookmark a URL - you can enter the URL of a file or page on the Internet or your local webserver, and the CODA hardware will download it directly from that URL when required.
  • Create a smart playlist - this is a playlist that is created and updated automatically based on certain rules. You could create one that contained all sources with the word 'News' in their name, for example.
  • Other web services - you can access content already stored on common web services such as Flickr and YouTube. Over time we plan to integrate with many other services this way.

Why not try it now? If you have a photo on your PC, for example, or a PDF file, try uploading it to CODA. You can always delete it later. As you've seen in the the Content Formats page, some source types need to be handled in particular ways. For instance, Powerpoint files must be uploaded to our servers if you want them to appear on your CODAbox, because the server converts them to a format that the CODA hardware can understand. Similarly, RSS feeds, by their very nature, are live data and only work when bookmarked by their URL.

Managing Playlists

A Playlist is an ordered slideshow of content, with each item being displayed for a given duration. You can put multiple sources into a playlist as a way of creating a running order for when they appear on a screen. To create a new playlist click the + button at the bottom of the Library column. To delete a playlist select it in the Library column and press the - button. To modify a playlist's name or other attributes select it in the Library column and then press the EDIT button under the column, or just double click on the playlist in the column. To add items to a playlist, go to the All sources view, find the source you want in the main panel, and drag it onto the playlist you want in the Library column. When you do this the source is added to the end of the playlist with its default duration - for things like images which don't have an intrinsic duration of their own, this defaults to 30 seconds, but you can change it. To edit the playlist's order and the duration of entries select the playlist in the Library column so you can see all the entries in it, like in the diagram above. In this view you can drag items around to change their order of playback, and you can edit the duration of items either using the EDIT button or double clicking on an entry. You can select multiple items at once using ctrl-click on Windows and command-click on the Mac, or you can select a sequence of items by clicking on the first item, then shift-clicking on the last item.

Sources versus Playlist Entries

When you look at the entries in a playlist, you'll notice that the icons are not in full colour, but in black and white. This is to remind you that you are looking at a playlist entry and not at the source itself. Often this distinction is fairly unimportant, but there is one situation where you will definitely want to remember it: when you edit or delete a source itself then all uses of that source are affected, but if you edit or delete a playlist entry, then you affect only the presence of the source in that playlist. So, for example, if you delete an image from a playlist, the image is still in CODA and can be used again - it just won't be part of that playlist. If, however, you delete the image source from "All sources" then it is totally removed from CODA and from all the playlists it appears in.