Multi-Headed Multimedia Presentation Software?

Brian Hudson asks: "My friend and I volunteer at our local church in creating and coordinating multimedia presentations used for various activities, including services. The needs we have for our multimedia system are not intimately tied to the fact that this is a church. However, the only programs that we have found so far that allow us to use one monitor as a control screen and the other as a display screen (as in hooked up to our distribution amp and then to the projectors some 100 feet away) are designed solely for worship services. Does anyone know of any well done presentation software?"

"To be frank with everyone, aside from the fact that nonsequential display of slides is possible, these programs are hardly better than Powerpoint (Gotta love the fancy gradient and the way the letters 'shoot' onto the screen). Furthermore, it doesn't help when poorly written drivers, and an unstable platform in general, cause our computer to go down right in the middle of a presentation!

I am running a Matrox G400 TV Dual Head video card and have seen support listed for Linux, although have yet to see whether or not that includes dual display support. Despite my current config, I am perfectly willing to run two more supported video cards if necessary. As of now, our Windows program (called MediaShout) has the capability of sequencing a variety of slides using primitive loops in addition to having the capability to click on any desired slide to display it. Media types include all 'standard' image and audio types as well as support for MPEG-1. Any suggestions on a comparable solution would be great as we are getting extremely irritated with our trouble in finding flexible solutions that don't cost an arm and a leg. (MediaShout itself cost us around $500)"

Comments

Don't know about presentation software, but:

[deno]

I don't know much (allmost nothing) about presentation software, but I know one for sure: dual head G400 and G450 are supported under linux. In fact, Linux Mandrake 8.0 (Traktopel) will automatically recognise them and let you choose between "xinerama" or "separate screens" right at install time.

X and dual cards

[johnjones]

Ok

this has been done so many time before you should realy do some research first !

personally what has worked best for me has been 2 vid cards one wich is the main display and a old one (1024x768 does not need much) running the projector

then I simply write my presentation in lynx or nowadays openoffice(staroffice) presentor and send it to the X display 1 (the projector) on my machine you can also run moveis this way, any app that can run in X can be sent to display on 1 simple realy we run this method on plasma screens.

not that hard realy oh and projectors suck what would be cool is if you could get a card with digital out(ATI/matrox both do nice cards plus alot of speialized OEM's have linux/BSD support) and a projector with digital in !!! then running hundred feet away would not be a prob oh and get a creative sound card and register it as linux as these have the best sound support I have found

regards

john jones

The best presentation software available today...

[babbage]

...is, of course, Flash.

I'm so sick to death of seeing big, boring, bloated Powerpoint slideshows that are, aside from being generally completely devoid of content, also a terrible waste of resources.

A Flash movie with the same content can be much more dynamic, much smaller, and will work on damn near any platform without modification -- most everyone with a web browser seems to have the plugin for it by now. I'm not a fan of Flash by any means, but for this sort of task, I can't imagine why anyone would use Powerpoint instead. Powerpoint is, quite simply, pointless software.

As for the dual headed thing, other posters have addressed this. It's pretty easy with most modern hardware...

Presentation Software

[dgm3574]

I don't know about the multi-head capabilities of the software currently, but I used to be the webmaster for a multimedia software company called Scala. They used to put out software for the Amiga, but of course that became a losing proposition. So now they make some pretty kick-ass multimedia software for the PC. Sorry, no Linux version available now. I do remember seeing one of our engineers hook up a quad-headed display card to a system and running iPlay successfully on it. Was pretty cool actually. The software has a great interface and really nice smooth transitions and such. Try a free demo of it... Go to http://www.scala.com/ if you want more information.