The DIY Signage Guide: How to Build Open Source Digital Signage

Quick: It’s 15 minutes until your store opens for business. You’ve got a TV, and you need to turn it into digital signage. And, you have a budget of $0.

Your best option is to pull your laptop out, fire up PowerPoint, throw together some signage slides, and connect an HDMI cable to your store’s TV. Crisis averted.

That’s not going to be sustainable for long, though. You need that laptop to keep your business running—and dedicating a laptop to running your signage would cost well more than your budget of zero. Time to start looking into better, free digital signage solutions.

Here’s how to turn your spare monitor or TV into digital signage for free, with tools that come with your TV or with open-source software, along with the best tools to grow your digital signage deployment as your company grows.

Turn Your TV Into a Free Digital Sign Player

The cheapest way to roll out digital signage is to repurpose an older TV or monitor. The older your screen is, the less likely it is to be a smart TV. But even basic TVs from a decade ago often included USB ports, and that’s all you need for the cheapest digital signage.

Because if your TV has a USB port, odds are it can play photos and videos from a USB drive.

Check your TV first to see if it has a USB port. If so, grab a USB flash drive. Make sure it’s FAT formatted, as that’s the file system most widely supported on TVs and standalone media players—here’s how, in macOS and Windows. Then copy some random photos and videos onto your flash drive and insert it into the TV.

Depending on your TV, you may have to press a media button on the remote, or select the USB drive from your input options. Then, you’ll likely be able to view photos in a slideshow and playback videos. Tap around the options to see what’s possible. On a Sony TV, for example, the default video playback options let you repeat a video indefinitely. You may also need to check your core TV settings to keep your screen from going to sleep after playing back photos and videos for too long.

With the setup out of the way, you can make slides that are perfect for digital signage. PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides are good options to lay out text and images sized for the big screen. Once you’ve designed announcements and menus and anything else your company’s signage needs, export your slides either as JPG images or as an MP4 video (in PowerPoint and Keynote). Copy the slides to your USB drive, delete any older photos and videos, and connect the USB drive to your TV.

Now, every time you want to update your signage, you’ll have to update the slides on your USB drive. Tedious, but possible for a single digital sign.

Showcase a Website From A Smart TV Browser

If you have a somewhat newer TV, it might have a built-in web browser. That could be another way to turn your TV into digital signage. Built-in browsers, though, are often far more limited than the browser on your computer, so you’ll have to check first to see what’s possible.

Start by experimenting with Google Slides. Can you open a Google Slides URL on your browser? If so, you could open your slideshow, go full-screen, and rely on that for your digital signage. Whenever you make a change to your Google Slides, they’ll show up on your TV.

If Google Slides won’t run, you could export your slides as images, and perhaps make a WordPress blog or other basic website with the images as an auto-changing slideshow. That’s the idea behind WPScreens and Smart Slider: You can build a slideshow in WordPress, then open the site in your TV’s browser for simple digital signage. Update the content in WordPress, and your signage will update.

Use Chromecast to Cast Websites to Your Signage

Speaking of websites, they can be another great way to build cheap, basic digital signage with a Chromecast.

Chromecasts are either a $30 or so streaming device or a built-in feature on some newer TVs. They’re designed to stream anything you have open on your Google Chrome browser, or in a compatible app like YouTube. If you already have one, it could be another cheap way to turn your TV into a digital sign.

Add a Chromecast to your TV, then open a webpage in Chrome, choose Cast in the browser’s menu, and moments later you’ll see it on your TV. Here, again, a presentation is your best bet for simple signage. Google Slides is directly integrated with Chromecast; start a slideshow, and you can choose to cast it to your TV right from Google Slides. Or, you could drag a video file into Chrome to cast it to your TV instead.

Chrome, by default, only lets you stream to one Chromecast at a time. You could work around that with Gogolplex Theatre or Chromecast Kiosk, both free, open-source tools that let you cast websites to multiple Chromecasts at once. That would mean you could manage more than one Chromecast-powered TV as digital signage, as long as your laptop’s open and on the same WiFi network as your TVs (though, do note, neither project has been updated since 2021).

Another similar option is if your TV has built-in UPnP or DLNA casting (check your TV menu or settings to see if it does). If so, you could use the free Go2TV app to cast any video file from your computer to your TV. It, again, requires having your computer open and on the same network as your TV but can work for smaller digital signage deployments.

Use Raspberry Pi Devices to Power Your TV

If you’re considering buying a Chromecast for your signage, though, Raspberry Pi devices—a $35 or so tiny computer—could also be an option worth considering. Now, Raspberry Pi’s are the most stripped-down computer you can buy. They’re literally a circuit board with an ARM CPU, RAM, USB, micro HDMI, and Ethernet ports—and that’s it. You’ll need to add a power supply, cables, a keyboard, and external storage, plus it would likely be smart to invest in a case so you don’t accidentally fry the board.

Once that’s out of the way, though, you’ll have a capable-if-basic Linux computer connected to your TV. The latest Raspberry Pi can support 4k screens, and its built-in tools could play a slideshow of your digital signage slides or video without much trouble.

Some digital signage companies even base their media players on Raspberry Pi as it's a cost effective choice.

But there are plenty of Yodeck alternatives if you want to use Raspberry Pi for your signage.

A better option, to keep your signage up-to-date, would be to install the open-source signage Anthias on each Raspberry Pi. Then, you can log into a web dashboard to set what’s showing on your screen, as long as you’re connected to the same network. Anthias can show full-screen images, videos, and webpages in a slide show, with settings for how long each item should play and when it should be shown. That’s all you can do, though—Raspberry Pi devices don’t have enough power to run full-screen, app-driven dashboards with dynamic data, and the free software for Raspberry Pi doesn’t support remote management.

You’ll need to manage each screen individually, and can only update your screens when you’re on the same network. And the costs will always be more than just the Raspberry Pi, as the board itself is not enough to run your screens. But at least it’s a cheap hardware option to build basic digital signage and keep your screens showing your content when your computer’s asleep—something that’s not possible with Chromecast streaming.

Host Open Source Digital Signage Software on Your Server

Want to manage digital signage across multiple stores and offices, from anywhere? And want to build more advanced digital signage dashboards with more than just web pages, images, and videos?

That’s where Xibo comes in. It’s the most powerful free digital signage solution, but it requires a much larger software and hardware investment. There used to be more open-source signage options. LibreSignage was one of the more popular, but it’s been unmaintained since early 2021. Concerto and DisplayMonkey were other popular signage options, but they were last updated in 2018. That leaves Xibo as the best open-source signage option today.

First, you’ll need Xibo CMS running on a server. The recommended route is to install it on Docker, on a Linux server; we set it up using a $10/month Digital Ocean server, following these Xibo Docker setup directions. Once it’s set up, log in with the default username (xibo_admin) and password (password), and set up new credentials to manage your signage.

Then, you need Xibo player apps on your screens. Xibo supports Android, Tizen, and webOS smart TVs, though its apps aren’t in the Play Store so you’ll need to download and sideload them on your smart TV with a USB drive.

Read more about setting up Samsung Tizen for digital signage.

You could use Xibo on a dedicated Android TV box, but it does not run on Raspberry Pi devices as they’re not powerful enough to support it. If your TVs aren’t smart TVs, Xibo also supports Windows, so if you have a spare PC you could run the Xibo app on it to power your signage.

You can then enter your Xibo CMS domain and key on your Xibo TV app to turn it into digital signage.

Now you can make slides and dashboards for your digital signage in the Xibo CMS. You can build full-screen layouts that only show one item at a time, or multi-region layouts to show, say, a core slide in the center and a ticker-tape on the bottom of the screen. 

Xibo includes a built-in calendar, clock, charts, database, RSS feed reader, and other basic apps. You can also show an existing webpage on your signage, or upload a PowerPoint file or hand-coded website to display on your signage. There are no built-in tools to design screens or dashboards, so your best option is still to build signs in PowerPoint, Canva, or other design tools, then import them into your Xibo signage.

Xibo is a bit more trouble to get started using, and its interface isn’t as intuitive as some. If you have multiple screens, spare hardware to power them, and the time to administer a Docker server, though, it’s the open-source software that includes the most digital signage features.

Use ScreenCloud's Pixi device for hassle-free signage

If you’re looking for a simple and reliable way to get digital signage up and running (without fiddling with code or extra setup) Pixi by ScreenCloud might be your best bet.

Pixi is a purpose-built device designed to deliver high-performance digital signage, right out of the box. It plugs directly into your screen’s HDMI port and runs ScreenCloud’s software natively, meaning no installs, no downloads, no surprises.

And the best part? It's plug and play. All you need is to connect it to your Wi-Fi or Ethernet, pair it with your ScreenCloud account using the on-screen code, and you’re done.

The device is also built to run 24/7 without hiccups, which is a rare find for a $65 budget device.

For small businesses or anyone who wants to avoid dealing with operating systems, app installs, or remote access configurations, Pixi is a solid option.

Building more advanced digital signage

Everything in life is filled with tradeoffs—and digital signage is no exception. As your company grows, the importance of your digital signage will grow, too—as will your team’s expectations. You’ll want to show live data from apps, from the weather to this week’s sales performance, in live-updating dashboards. You’ll want a way to see which screens are turned on, what they’re playing, and a way to switch up their content—even from your phone, via Siri. You’ll want to split your company’s signage into departments and buildings and regions, to give each team power over what shows on their signage while still sharing company messaging across every location.

And you’ll want to do it all with reliable hardware you don’t have to hack together.

Xibo’s great to get started building out a set of signage, and honestly, the smallest offices and stores will get value even from basic slideshow-powered signage. But for everything else beyond that, ScreenCloud is a better option.

It’s easier from the start. You can run ScreenCloud from Android TVs with a quick download from the Play Store, or buy a dedicated $150 ScreenCloud OS device for plug-and-play signage. Then you can build signage personalized to your team with built-in app integrations, or design your slides in Canvas and throw together a menu with built-in apps. You can code automated dashboards in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS with Playgrounds, or use ScreenCloud Dashboards to scrape widgets from any website or app and put them on your signage. And then, it’ll grow with your team, with centrally managed signage you can update from anywhere.

If you want more from your signage than the free, open-source signage tools offer today, sign up for a free ScreenCloud trial and build your team’s first ScreenCloud-powered signage today.

Image Credits: Raspberry Pi photo by Jainath Ponnala via Unsplash; Header Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters via Unsplash