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?
Use the screensaver that allows you to put a line of text scrolling along the screen ? Is that obvious, or am I a genius of lateral thinking ? I think all versions of windows have it. Do you need to display the same text on all the monitors, or have a message scrolling across several monitors ? The latter would be more complicated needing multiple video outs etc. Simon.
Message profusion alert. You could use a web-page and javascript / style sheets etc. I think if would be helpful if you supplied more details about exactly how you want to display the info. i.e. moving, a single stable page of text, etc. Simon.
I don't think VB is the right tool for the job. It may well be suited to prototyping interactive GUI applications, but that's about it. Then again, I don't think Windows is the right tool for the job either. :)
Would a screen-saver compiler do this for you? I think you can get freeware proggies that also build screenshots and savers with all different kinds of effects.
Try
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for a load of graphics effects and screen image type proggies. You're bound to find something there that'll do this for you.
There's certainly someone who produces software to do this on a Solaris sparc system (I don't remember the name, but could probably find out). However, situation is probably slightly different from yours, as it's done by having some
30 or more video cards in the system, and each can be displaying something completely different. Typically used for multi-panel display walls, flight simulators, etc.
In article , sm snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com writes
Just wants to be a few pages of static text changing once every 10 sec or something. A bit like teletext.
All monitors will have the same text. It is for a university dept who want to display stuff like "10am 2nd year lecture cancelled", that sort of thing.
The problem with powerpoint is that the system has to be operable by the hard of thinking. Making up a power point slide and then making it display it could be too difficult.
- it is a $15 shareware package scrolling screensaver that reads its messages from a text file, so the user would only have to know how to edit a message in notepad and then set the srreensaver running.
A more DIY option would be to use a web page with a DHTML or java script to produce the scrolling text. There are loads of scripts out there, some free, some commercial [
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The script could read the text from a file. If the web page has a Meta-refresh tag you can set it to reload itself every five minutes or so, and you could put the source file somewhere on the network - update the source file and the message will update. The display PC then runs a web browser in 'kiosk mode. An added bonus of this approach is that you can incorporate other web content, ie logos, web cams, cricket scores etc without much effort. The down side is that any self respecting student will hack into the system within minutes to cancel the boring lectures!
Have you considered html? I would just set up a browser, in fullscreen mode (I'd do it in linux, but there should be a way in windows) set to start on a default page. Then just edit the page.
Mozilla's kiosk mode works on windows as well as linux. You often see powerpoint error messages or BSODs on windows displays doing this sort of job. I would use a scrap PC (e.g. early pentium) linux, mozilla and meta refresh. You could either change the page on the local machine or over a network.
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.
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