How To Get Android Media Player To 1) Reboot After Internet Loss, 2) Clear Cached Data Every 24Hrs

[Jeff Whiteis]

I currently work as a developer/IT guy for an ATM/Bitcoin company. On top of our ATM's are monitors and media players where we display DOOH/programmatic type advertisements. We use Android-based media players along with the PerpetualTV platform/app to handle this. We're having issues at some locations where the media players go offline because of shoddy internet. Some of our monitors are freezing up because of limited amount of RAM. Both of these issues require us to go out to these locations and manually reboot the device. We're trying to cut down on that and have the media player resolve these 2 issues itself.

So what I'm looking to accomplish is to get these media players to automatically reboot themselves if they lose internet connectivity (Ethernet or WiFi). So if internet is lost, I need the device to restart/reboot.

Secondly, I'm looking for a script or app of some sort that will automatically clear cached data from the device every 24 hours. (Cached data from the PerpetualTV app). We're hoping this will help clear up some of the memory issues.

What is the best approach to handling this? App Development is not my forte, but I am a full stack web developer. I'm just not sure if this is something I could handle or if I need to hire someone. If I need to hire someone - I'm curious about the cost associated with this...

Can someone point me in the right direction?

 

[mikedt]

I currently work as a developer/IT guy for an ATM/Bitcoin company. On top of our ATM's are monitors and media players where we display DOOH/programmatic type advertisements. We use Android-based media players along with the PerpetualTV platform/app to handle this. We're having issues at some locations where the media players go offline because of shoddy internet. Some of our monitors are freezing up because of limited amount of RAM. Both of these issues require us to go out to these locations and manually reboot the device. We're trying to cut down on that and have the media player resolve these 2 issues itself.

So what I'm looking to accomplish is to get these media players to automatically reboot themselves if they lose internet connectivity (Ethernet or WiFi). So if internet is lost, I need the device to restart/reboot.

Secondly, I'm looking for a script or app of some sort that will automatically clear cached data from the device every 24 hours. (Cached data from the PerpetualTV app). We're hoping this will help clear up some of the memory issues.

What is the best approach to handling this? App Development is not my forte, but I am a full stack web developer. I'm just not sure if this is something I could handle or if I need to hire someone. If I need to hire someone - I'm curious about the cost associated with this...

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Quite frankly from what you describe, it sounds like this PerpetualTV app itself needs to be fixed, so it can run perpetually, and anything else is like a band-aid for something that's broken IMO. Because I'm not sure if you can force a device to reboot every 24 hours with just an app or script, not unless it's rooted. I was speaking to an ad platform tech a couple of years ago, and he did mention his company's billboard systems and kiosks that used Microsoft Windows had to self reboot periodically, because the long term always on reliability of Windows isn't good.

An unmanned ad platform that's on 24/7/365, should be able to deal with internet outages and resume when internet is restored. Really these things shouldn't even need continuous internet to show their ad or information rotations. and may only update their ad cache with new ads periodically, like once a day. If there's no connectivity available when they try to ping the server for updates, they should just continue to play what they've got already.

The issues with it consuming cache and RAM until it freezes and crashes, that sounds like a memory leak bug to me, and/or the app's garbage clean-up system is not up to snuff, e.g. clearing old data. Have you tried enquiring with the PerpetualTV devs or tech support about the issues?

I know China Railways passenger trains have Android based ad and propaganda screens in their carriages. I only knew it was Android because I saw one booting after the power went out at one time.

BTW is it this app you're having problems with?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.perpetualtv.android&hl=en_US&gl=US
That's apparently only had about a 100 installs and only one review.