Controling many screen points from distance

[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

 

[gamerman4]

A desktop based app would be most stable, browser-based video players aren't the greatest. I like VLC or Media Player Classic.

You could use a VPN to setup a connection between your base computer and all of the remote computers.

All videos should be in the same folder or at least in multiple folders under one main folder and a playlist file in the main folder that links to each video, then create a batch file that copies your main video folder onto each remote computer over the VPN connection.

You could then have a batch file on each computer that runs every night to open that playlist, thus updating the video line-up.

The only problem I see is that if your media player is playing a video and you try to upload a video with the same name, it will not copy because the file is being used. To prevent this, every time you update the playlist with new videos, any new videos should have a different name, also you could move the files that are already on the remote computer to a different location so they don't interfere.