thunder04

iTrader: (1)

One of the schools in the district I work for has a little mobile video studio and they do televised morning announcements. I installed one of them automatic source switches from Radio Shack so that when they're not broadcasting, a still image with the school's "station ID" and the time broadcasts starts displays.

It would be cool to be able to go beyond that. I'd love to be able to do something like a continuously looping slideshow with various announcements and whatnot as well as have a looping playlist of music.

I'm sure I can do this with PowerPoint and iTunes, but I'd love to be able to update things on the fly and have it be seemless.

Does anybody know of any free software that may be able to do this? I have a PowerBook to work with, so it'll need to work under either OS X or Linux.

Billiam

I don't have any suggestions to offer you for a free solution. I did, however, want to chime in to make sure you're aware that standard def NTSC video uses non-square pixels. That means that if you're building graphics to be displayed on regular SD video, you need to build them at one size, and then disproportionately scale them to a different size. If you don't do this, the graphics will appear distorted when displayed on the TV. The most likely resolutions you'll run into are building your graphics at 864x480 and then rescaling them to the 720x480 dimensions of SD video.

thunder04

iTrader: (1)

Yep, totally aware.

sho_nuff1997

iTrader: (2)

I don't know about free software.

iPhoto, iMovie

If you don't have powerpoint, you can get openoffice for free.

Or perhaps a flash slideshow maker?

thunder04

iTrader: (1)

OK, so PowerPoint and iTunes actually work pretty well!

I set iTunes to random and loop, so hopefully it'll start over once it's gone through the entire library.

I set the slide transitions to random with a slide duration of 10 seconds.

The PowerBook happens to support dual displays, so I set the background of the 2nd display to dark grey. The presentation will be updated from another computer, then I'll remote in and replace the presentation. So, worst case is maybe 30 seconds to a minute of a grey screen. Totally fine.

I made sure to adjust the power settings so the machine doesn't sleep or turn off displays....but I forgot to disable the screen saver (just watched the screen saver activate ).

thunder04

iTrader: (1)

Now the question is...how many days will it take iTunes (latest version) and PowerPoint '04 to crash. lol