Tim Mitchell wrote:
Well it's kind of DIY
I am trying to make a simple message display system which has a number
of video monitors run from the TV-out of a PC.
I was convinced someone must supply some simple software to run on the
PC to actually output the messages, but though I have googled long and
hard, I can't find anything.
Powerpoint would possibly be OK, but I was looking for something simpler
- really just a few pages of straight text display. With a bit of time I
could write something in visual basic, but it seems a shame to reinvent
something which already exists. Anyone know of anything to do this?

1) Irfanview does a screenshow, so if you have a collection of jpegs it
will show them in order. You can load the screenshow from a .txt file of
image filenames usign a command line switch.

2) Opera browser has a kiosk mode. If you write your collection of pages
with a meta redirect tag, so that on page 1 it has a redirect tag to
page 2 after 10 seconds, on page 2 it has a redirect tag to page 3, etc,
(lastpage.html redirects back to firstpage.html) then you can put Opera
into full-screen/kiosk mode (which also gets rid of the adverts), set
page1 up as the browser home page, and away you go.

Once you've got your layout set up in a CSS file or template, quite easy
to whack out new text.

Opera and Irfanview both free.

3) DVD or VideoCD authoring packages can be had for under £30 and would
let you burn a slideshow to DVDR or CDR, then you can run it from a £30
DVD player and not need a PC at all.

Option 3 is not so useful if you want to change the text on the fly.

Option 2 would auto-update if you have a meta tag for no-cache (I think
it's called pragma) and your external software writes .html to the disk
from which Opera is running, then if you update page14.html Opera will
display the new page14.html when it gets round to it in the cycle.

Option 1 will autoupdate if you are using something like GIMP to create
the .jpegs that Irfanview is readign. See cooltext.com for an example of
driving GIMP

For your university application you can use a PHP backend to a web-based
interface to actually set up the text. You can also use the same script
to produce a 'linear' page (non slideshow) of current announcements,
that students can view on the intranet.

Heck, if you're using Active Desktop you can display it as the
background to every terminal on campus.


Owain