There's a system out there that does exactly what you're looking for. It's called the Playback Machine. I currently use it to power the television station for BayCon, which is a science fiction convention in San Jose, California. It's available from CPAN, here: http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/S/ST/STEPHE N/Video-PlaybackMachine-0.03.tar.gz
Here's how it works. You enter your schedule using a web-based front end, picking from a list of movies from a database. Whenever it's time to play a movie, the PM will play it. Whenever it isn't time, PM will play music while showing picture slides, announcements, and "up next"s. You can change the schedule while the system is running. The database backend makes it impossible to inadvertantly schedule two overlapping entries.
The main issue with it is that it's rather difficult to set up. Since I'm the primary developer and primary user, there's been little work on making it easy to install for other people. However, if others are interested in using this system, I would love to work with them. Please send me a private message if you're interested.
About a year ago I created a system which accomplishes the same thing. We use it to run the television station for BayCon. It's called Video::PlaybackMachine, and it's available on CPAN:
I haven't examined the code, so I'm basing this post on a quick read of the white paper.
The (known) differences are:
1. PlaybackMachine is based on Xine, while VideoKeg is based on MPlayer.
2. PlaybackMachine uses a postgres backend database, so it's impossible to schedule overlapping programs. (I'm not sure what VideoKeg uses.) It's also possible to reschedule programs while PlaybackMachine is running.
3. In addition to being able to play video short commercials, PlaybackMachine can play slides with accompanying background music.
4. There's a web interface to PlaybackMachine's scheduling system.
There are probably things that VideoKeg can do that PlaybackMachine can't, but I don't know about them yet. I'm very glad that VideoKeg is out there-- just having the hardware specs for the VIA EPIA box is a wonderful thing, and in this space the more the merrier.
ReadySet is a collection of templates in HTML and CSS for project requirements and specification. Even if they're not perfect for your organization, they can serve as a starting point.
I've had this happen to me twice. (The second time was tonight.) I'm trying to undock my IBM T42, and put it into suspend mode. It freezes. I can power it down, but can't bring it back up again.
I'm running Mandrake Community Edition 10.
Last time I sent it back to the factory; they replaced the motherboard. I'm going to do the same tomorrow.
Interesting to note that it referred to the machine as a "coder." As I remember from the Neal Stephenson book, in 1945 the word "computer" referred to a person who did math.
So, in 1945, a coder was a machine, and a computer was a person...
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There's a system out there that does exactly what you're looking for. It's called the Playback Machine. I currently use it to power the television station for BayCon, which is a science fiction convention in San Jose, California. It's available from CPAN, here: http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/S/ST/STEPHE N/Video-PlaybackMachine-0.03.tar.gz
t k/mplayer/xfree86/epia/touchscreen/whitepaper/Vide oKeg.html.
Here's how it works. You enter your schedule using a web-based front end, picking from a list of movies from a database. Whenever it's time to play a movie, the PM will play it. Whenever it isn't time, PM will play music while showing picture slides, announcements, and "up next"s. You can change the schedule while the system is running. The database backend makes it impossible to inadvertantly schedule two overlapping entries.
The main issue with it is that it's rather difficult to set up. Since I'm the primary developer and primary user, there's been little work on making it easy to install for other people. However, if others are interested in using this system, I would love to work with them. Please send me a private message if you're interested.
Another system which does the same thing is VideoKeg, which is written up here: http://ian.blenke.com/projects/videojukebox/perl/
About a year ago I created a system which accomplishes the same thing. We use it to run the television station for BayCon. It's called Video::PlaybackMachine, and it's available on CPAN:
h ine-0.03/PlaybackMachine.pm
http://search.cpan.org/~stephen/Video-PlaybackMac
I haven't examined the code, so I'm basing this post on a quick read of the white paper.
The (known) differences are:
1. PlaybackMachine is based on Xine, while VideoKeg is based on MPlayer.
2. PlaybackMachine uses a postgres backend database, so it's impossible to schedule overlapping programs. (I'm not sure what VideoKeg uses.) It's also possible to reschedule programs while PlaybackMachine is running.
3. In addition to being able to play video short commercials, PlaybackMachine can play slides with accompanying background music.
4. There's a web interface to PlaybackMachine's scheduling system.
There are probably things that VideoKeg can do that PlaybackMachine can't, but I don't know about them yet. I'm very glad that VideoKeg is out there-- just having the hardware specs for the VIA EPIA box is a wonderful thing, and in this space the more the merrier.
I'd check out the ReadySet project, hosted on Tigris: http://readyset.tigris.org/.
ReadySet is a collection of templates in HTML and CSS for project requirements and specification. Even if they're not perfect for your organization, they can serve as a starting point.
I've had this happen to me twice. (The second time was tonight.) I'm trying to undock my IBM T42, and put it into suspend mode. It freezes. I can power it down, but can't bring it back up again.
I'm running Mandrake Community Edition 10.
Last time I sent it back to the factory; they replaced the motherboard. I'm going to do the same tomorrow.
So, in 1945, a coder was a machine, and a computer was a person...