Signage Control Software?

[Mr. Lightman]

Greetings everyone. This topic is a bit off my beaten path, so please bear with me. We're looking to install a couple HDTV's around the building to display promotional and informational materials. I'm looking for some sort of software that will allow us to display a blend of slideshow-style and video content in a continuous loop. For example, the screens would display a few slides about locating Sunday school classes, then a promotional video for the youth ministry, then back to some more slides, and so on. (Oh, and by "slides," I mean animated content, not plain-ol' PowerPoint slides.)

Does anyone know of a good system that will allow us to put together and display such content? Thank you very much for your help.

[bggowing]

I use MediaShout on a timed interval to do just what you want to do. I've got a PC set up with MS and I load in all the announcements and videos into the script and automate it. You can control how long each slide is up and it will play videos as well.

[Mr. Lightman]

Brian,

Thanks for the quick reply. I figured that worship software would be one of the possibilities, but we use SongShow Plus here instead of MediaShout. If there is a way to do in SSP what you are doing in MS, it's something I don't know about. Hate to purchase licenses for two different presentation programs...

[bladeaudio]

Look in to the Datavideo MP1000. It will play video (with audio) and images in a schedule, you can control it and download new content to it over a network.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...ia_Player.html

[TechPastor]

I've been very impressed with the product @ mediasignage.com

[kbob]

funny you should mention that-fellow CMN'er Ed Quals-owner of Just Add Power-just let me know about a new add on to his system that will let you do exactly that hardware wise, using cat five cabling.

[sadlerjon]

We're using VLC running on a bunch of Linux NetBooks. The content is being multicast from a central server making updates simple and all screens stay in sync. VLC maintains a looping playlist which can be updated via a web browser interface, making the workflow for updates easy for our office staff to do.

Since this uses IPTV (MPEG2/IP), it can also be received by the IPTV set-top boxes we have setup throughout our campus. The announcement loop is just one program in our IPTV system -- we also have the local TV stations (from their ATSC signals) as well as a media server that can playback recorded content.

[frank]

Take a look at the Roku standalone media servers. Very economical, requires no dedicated PC, and some models can be updated via your network. I've got a couple of older units that work like a charm.

[twj]

Why can't you do that in SSP? It's just a looping slide show with the occasional video. SSP can do that. Are you using an older version that doesn't have those features?

[jksbc]

I would take Tom's advice. I don't know why you couldn't do this in SSP. Here is another easy option I used when we were still having services in a movie theater. I saved my regular Keynote announcement slideshow loops as video files. I also had some promotional video stuff that I had made previously. I went into iMovie and put the announcement loop and videos in order repeating them several times so I could add a soundtrack of several songs that would play without repeating for at least a half hour. I adjusted the audio so the soundtrack volume would fade down and not interfere with the promo videos. Then I burned it to a DVD and the theater manager played it on their lobby monitors via DVD player. It worked great. In our current facility I just feed the lobby monitor with whatever is being shown in the sanctuary but I am considering making some changes.

[frank]

I forgot to mention that you can occasionally find some of the low-end Roku media servers (HD-600) for <$50 on ebay (I've got two of them), and a big step up to the HD-2000 for <$125.

New models with greatly advanced features start <$300.

[Mr. Lightman]

Thank you all very much for the input. I just finished putting the system together (on paper, that is) and sent off a quote to the Church Administrator for approval. I went with Roku's BrightSign HD110 media server. Quite an impressive set of features for well under $300. I'm planning to run the server's VGA output at 1366x768 through a Kramer VP300N distro amp to three wall-mounted Vizio flat panel HDTV's (two 32" and one 22"), all with matching native resolutions. With 100M of Kramer bulk VGA and connectors thrown in, total system came in just over $2K, which was the top end of my budget.

Now I get to wait for his OK to hit "Checkout" on all my saved shopping carts. Thanks again for all the help!