Reception area PC display

[wxman]

I have been tasked with setting up a "Welcome to Company X" type display screen in the current clients reception area. I am sure that you have all seen this sort of thing on your travels...

Any one have any experience of such a system - I have hardware to spare so I am just looking for any (free?) software / suggestions on how to do this.

The client wants to display some video / image slideshow, Welcome text and a news / weather RSS feed.

[administrator]

If you know a little Flash then you could do a quick animation, local installation of your favourite web server, browser to hit localhost to view a page with embedded Flash file and then hit F11 on the keyboard to go full screen.

[stek]

Sun Sunray in kiosk mode?

[NickFitz]

Anything that does a "kiosk mode" slideshow would work. There's an estate agents near me that does this gubbins on some screens in their window, although it doesn't always work

It should be possible to use PowerPoint for something like this by creating a batch file to run the relevant deck fullscreen, but as the estate agent's example shows, you really need to have it as a startup item

EDIT: just noticed the bit about free software. Total overkill, but OpenOffice.org also has a PowerPoint-alike presentation thingy, and will run on a free OS rather than Windows. As for the RSS feed stuff: IIRC, you should be able to run Firefox in full-screen/kiosk mode, fully locked down, and a simple JS-based app could do all that stuff.

EDIT AGAIN: Oh, and Firefox-with-Flash would also be able to cope with video, but if it's proprietary video content, then encoding it using the Ogg codecs for video and audio would allow use of Firefox's (or, if you made a custom app embedding it, the underlying Gecko rendering engine's) HTML5 <video> capabilities. You can definitely meet all your requirements using free software, but it's almost certainly possible to do it all with an installation of Firefox and a few tweaks to about:config, assuming you can encode the video appropriately. Alternatively, you could knock something up that embeds Google's Chromium (their version of the open-source WebKit rendering engine from Apple that drives Google Chrome) and use H.264-encoded video (compatible with Flash) via HTML5 instead.

[d000hg]

...

Not been taken out by any storms then... where you been all this time?

[VectraMan]

Not free, but:

http://www.digitalworkshop.com/products/Creator.shtml

[wxman]

Not been taken out by any storms then... where you been all this time?

Been in Iceland looking at the Eurupting Volcano and the Northan Lights- but off to the USA (Again) May 1st in search of tornadoes !!

Back to the digital display- I am going to have a look at. this which is free to boot!

[Churchill]

Been in Iceland looking at the Eurupting Volcano and the Northan Lights- but off to the USA (Again) May 1st in search of tornadoes !!
Back to the digital display- I am going to have a look at. this which is free to boot!

They're big things mate, howling huge masses of swirling air, you can't miss 'em!

Look for a girl in red shoes carrying a black dog, somewhere round Kansas.

[The Wikir Man]

Been in Iceland looking at the Eurupting Volcano and the Northan Lights- but off to the USA (Again) May 1st in search of tornadoes !!

Kind of like this?

[xoggoth]

At exhibitions I use excel to provide a continuous display. The vba timer cycles through a bunch of images from my installed programs as listed on a sheet. These are 832x690 and display in a box on a full screen background to look as if the actuals program are running. Dead simple but it works. Maybe you can mod it to suit, anyone can do vba.

http://www.gatekeeperel.co.uk/temp/demo6.xls

PS You could replace the picturebox by a webbrowser and cycle though a bunch of webpages similarly. More flexible.