Information display screen software

[bruce]

... video tape

How quaint

[sleah]

... video tape

How quaint

 

A very large proportion of the educational material at the school I work in is on VHS! Up until very recently we only transferred to or replaced with DVD when the tapes started to die. I say recently as it's impossible to get a DVD/VHS player now - you have to get one's that record which is pointless in a classroom.... (oh, and cost 2-3 x more)

The quality of a decent VHS tape is more than adequate for much of the material :) and teachers like them because they are far easier to use than a bl00dy DVD with it's forced info screens and menus to navigate just to watch a 5 min video for the umpteenth time.

Strange really that DVD was a HUGE step backwards in ease of use!

 

If that isn't OT I don't know what is... :** laughs out loud **:

 

Back on topic... we have a Onelan system in the 6th form area foyer and the secretarial staff love it. It's simple to update for them and it just works.

A great advantage is that it can be updated without the display going off or showing what you're up to...... that and the remote update from any networked computer with NO additional software beyond a web browser :D

[djw1981]

Hi. I've been searching around a bit.

 

We are looking to put a noticeboard type feature at the side entrance to our church. I was looking at ONeLAN's offerings which seem ideal - wirless hardware solution, remote updating and scheduling; different bits of content can be updated by different users etc. But also wondering if I;d be just as well with a PC. One issue could well the graphics quality with a desire to avoid the powerpoint jitter on animations.

 

I noticed this thread is now a wee bit old and wondered what people's thoughts were - needs to be VGA or above - no composite options. To play ether images, powerpoints, or even video files (comprised of the above, but rendered on another machine. We could do an X-over ethernet solution but that still needs a hardware playback unit somewhere.

 

It was all looking great til I saw OneLAN's £1k costing on here. Is that still about the same?

 

Cheapest solution would appear to same them as video / images onto a USB and playback via http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004VEITVS/ref=asc_df_B004VEITVS6665871?smid=AVWM7CHAO63TO&tag=googlecouk06-21&linkCode=asn&creative=22218&creativeASIN=B004VEITVS but I was after something less dependent on someone remembering to copy the files and upload to the player.

 

Any new developments sicne the thread was last updated?

[dbuckley]

Just yesterday on another forum I found a recommendation for this digital signage thing which runs on a Windows PC and drives your screen.

[Peter F]

Xibo is an open source solution.

 

A bit of experience with running a web server would help you, but it's nothing you couldn't learn easily enough.

 

As the website says "Xibo is an an open source, multi-display, multi-zone, fully scheduled digital signage solution controlled from a centrally managed web interface."

 

Pretty much sums it up.

 

Cheers,

 

Peter

[Floydey]

How about this at around £225.00 with a free to use evaluation

 

 

http://www.repeatsoftware.com/Downloads.aspx

[J Pearce]

A big +1 for xibo. I have a screen in our theatre foyer that displays show photos, notices and an upcoming events calendar fed by google calendar. It also hooks into the video over ip from the show relay cam for evening shows. A little coding experience is handy for making your own little inputs for regions, but there's a lot already out on the net.

[bruce]

Xibo's quite nice, but not in the same league (yet) as Onelan/etc - I'm sure it'll get there. The nice thing about it is that the display contoller can be any old PC.

 

djw - if you want more info, I can point you at a fairly extensive onelan install not a million miles away from you. PM me.

[J Pearce]

Indeed, but the OP did mention the onelan pricing might stretch his budget.

[AHYoung]

WE do a fair bit of digital signage and our default position is to use Onelan. Also to be clear you get 2 flavours of box, a publisher at roughly 1300 + and a sunbscriber at 900 + depending on the model. You need at least 1 publisher in a system, so one a single screen its an expensive way off doing things, but in terms of useability, reliability and expandability its a good choice if you have the budget. I could point you at a reasonable sized {8 box network} in your part of the world we supplied, and maybee its something to look at for the future. Its also important to remember its not a hardware product, but software sold on a hardware platform they Onelan know works reliably, and to that end we never sell it as a boxshift, it gets sold with a package of configuration and training, its not a straightforward thing to get your head round.

 

If your need is to "just run powerpoint" just save powerpoint as a self running application and let it go, if you have nothing else running on the machine and dont let it connect to the internet or update anything, it should just work. Id never suggest this for a corporate , but in this situation why use something to run powerpoint when it runs better itself. You wont get any dynamic content and you wont want to have to update it regularly, but it will cost you zero pounds and there will be nothing to learn.

 

Basically what im saying is its going to cost either nothing or 1500 + to do, both valid solutions, Id go for the no money option and wait for all the "wouldnt it be great if the screen did this" ideas to come in and then sit down and design a proper system and make a purchase based on your needs, any money spent on a budget solution now will ultimately be money wasted.

[dbuckley]

I was initially quite excited about Xibo (hat tip to Peter F, thanks, hadn't seen this one before), but it has two immediate issues I can see.

 

Th first is its licencing, which is the Affero General Public License. I'm in no way anti-GPL or anti-AGPL, but just see that for this application there are certain practical difficulties in complying with the licence conditions. The short of a AGPL application is that if you make any alterations to the codebase, you need to freely release your source (no problem so far), and with a digital signage application, I cant see a licence compatible way of making that fact known, as the licence requires you to, other than a slide that comes up that says "this is a AGPL application, and you are entitled to the for the source of it" which looks fugly. So I guess most people don't do that and thus are not honouring their licence conditions.

 

And seceondly is that it requires a Windows client for display. A Linux client would be much nicer, to run on one of those tiny micro systems running Linux, or even better, the Raspberry Pi.

 

All of which is a pity, as the data for the signage is held in a MySQL database, and thus one should be able to have dynamic signage by updating the database.

 

Maybe this'll all work out in time.

[bruce]

 

And seceondly is that it requires a Windows client for display. A Linux client would be much nicer, to run on one of those tiny micro systems running Linux, or even better, the Raspberry Pi.

 

 

There is a Linux/Python client in development, for the 1.3 code train. Not for 1.2 (current stable release). Needs an Nvidia graphics card.

 

Haven't tried it, but it claims to have all of the functionality of the windows client, other than powerpoint support.