Presentation software

[this_is_gav]

I work in a school and we have a TV in the foyer area showing off work, photos, videos, etc.

County provided us with The Life Channel a few years ago, a network-based solution to enable staff to upload JPEGs and videos into playlists which would then show on the TV throughout the day.

County have stopped their subscription and The Life Channel are wanting us to enter into a subscription agreement, which at 4 figures, we've no intention of doing (we've only got 100 kids here!)

Are there any similar programs or solutions which people are aware of? Setting up a PowerPoint presentation isn't an option.

 

[MarcLister]

Hi Gav. Me again.

We also have a TV, well plasma screen, in the foyer. It's currently showing my designed news screen. It has our school logo in each corner of the screen, the BBC News RSS feed at the bottom, a picture of the school playground tree in the centre and a text box to the right of the centre showing the date. On the left we have a photo box which runs through a folder of pictures and changes them every so often. It's run by a program called ImageFlyer, made by Sedao. At £749 ex VAT for a single licence it's quite expensive.

I was given this software to use and personally I wouldn't recommend it if I had to buy something new. It can handle videos, pictures and sounds so it could cope with multimedia; it's just the high cost that puts me off.

However I found a program called ViewIt, it costs $5 and handles HTML pages. You include each HTML page in a .ini file and at the end of each line, you put a number that defines how many seconds you want a page to be shown. You can use pages on a local machine, on a network, even websites.

To use ViewIt, you would need to make some HTML pages and set up the media to play videos and so on but I think it can be done.

Hope either of the suggestions suits.

 

[this_is_gav]

Cheers Marc,

Neither of them really do what we want (ImageFlyer might well do it, though it's more expensive than we'd want), though it seems Xibo may well do everything for free.

Going to spend a few days testing methinks.

 

[MarcLister]

Yeah I did think when writing the post that ImageFlyer was more user friendly but too expensive whereas ViewIt was more technical, thus limiting its user base but awesomely cheap. I will check out Xibo for myself.