[punisa]

Hello, I have a rather tricky task to complete, all help is appreciated.

(hope I'm putting this in the right forum, please correct me if I'm wrong)

We'll be installing plasma screens in several cities which will provide news, info and video advertising.

What needs to be accomplished:
- if connected to wireless internet, how would one control the media? (plasma screen is connected to a small computer)
- should we approach a simple method like having a full screen web browser display the info and control it with PHP? How stable would it be anyway?
- or should we go for some more advanced methods?

- how would you create uninterrupted video flow when adding new files?
- ideally, could you upload all the video files from the main base to remote locations and just loop them without the need for extra downloading (to save bandwith)
- should we try and develop a script that would check if the playlist changed after each video file? How would you do that?
- what type of video files should we go with? FLV and display them via browser or MPEG2 and display via desktop?

- how to be safe that freezing wont occur and what to do to prevent it?

- are there any software solutions that would be able to do that? One company offered us a software solution, but the price was way too much for us (over 15,000 $).

Thanks for reading and do feel free to ask me the questions and/or clarifications !

Marc

[Carbon]

Can't really comment on the software side, but.. shouldn't be too hard, but I would be concerned about how you're going to get your media. Doing this wirelessly is going to end up being an enormous pain in the ass, especially if you're in the middle of the city. It also raises a ton of security concerns: what if someone finds a vulnerability in your network and decides they'd like something other than advertising on every screen?

I would lease a dedicated line for each computer if at all possible, with your sort of budget this should be nothing (esp. compared to $15k) and will ensure you don't have to have people taking whatever goes up each week around on DVDs or something. Reliability is going to be a huge issue here and you don't want to complicate it by adding fickly Wi-Fi to the mix.

To prevent freezing I would buy a cheap large-VRAM HTPC-esque video card to accelerate decoding your high-res video. A consumer processor should be enough for this, probably a Q6600 as whatever you're using is likely going to be multi-threaded.

How far apart are these computers, say we're talking about all of them in one city? Are we talking all in the same building, or across several? I assume the latter. If they're hooked up to nice high-bandwidth lines, you can just have a remote server sitting in some air conditioned basement and auto-run some sort of script daily on each "client" machine to check a set FTP, download whatever some sort of configuration file says, then display it.

edit: Is the wireless connection needed because the computer is built into the unit or something, and it's in a bad place to run wires to a building?

[punisa]

Hi Carbon! Thanks for the tips.

The video screens are mostly far apart (as far as 300 miles), some are closer (in the same city), but 99% of the time we're talking about different buildings.

Unfortunately wireless option is our last resort as on some locations it's impossible to get solid wired DSL line.

I believe that we'll have to conduct many experiments before firing it all up : )
Some people advised me to look into the possibilities of VLC media player as a far better option then web players

[Carbon]

Yes, VLC would be a good pick for video, as I'm pretty sure it also supports some scripting. Would be a lot more stable then a web browser and display pretty much whatever you throw at it as well.