Samsung MagicInfo Screens running anything other than Powerpoints?

[adamtate]

Hello

I run six of these screens on the network at the school I work at and I was wondering if anybody views anything other than powerpoints on them? Now dont get me wrong, powerpoints do just work - quick and easy to make a design in photoshop, throw it into a powerpoint and publish it to the screens. But its all a bit... drab! I want to embed videos etc but how the hell would I embed a movie into powerpoint so that it works on the TVs? If I embed a movie thats say on the C drive of my machine, that video would have to be put onto the C drive of the TV for the movie to work wouldnt it? Are there any other ways around this or are there any other decent ideas that people can give me instead of powerpoints, that still allow me total customisation and creativity without having to code loads of things?

Oh... and I'm no good at flash!

ANY help would be appreciated guys!


Adam

[plexer]

Samsung magicinfo screens should be run by the samsung software that allows you to create regions with different media and schedule these as well.

Ben

[adamtate]

yeah at the moment i've got different powerpoints running in different parts of the school aimed at different audiences. I was wondering though really if theres any way of embedding videos etc so that they'd work on the screens? Powerpoint needs an actual path to where the video is stored for it to work, and if say I do it on the C drive of my machine I'd have to upload the video to the C drive of the screen for the video to work. This is a lot of work. I was wondering if theres any easier way?

Adam

[plexer]

Do you have the magicinfo software? if so you can use that assign a powerpoint to one area of a screen layout and video to another.

Ben

[adamtate]

I do have the magicinfo software, but with the amount of stuff we have to show, I might only want a 2 minute video running, and then the rest of the static information, and then back to the video again. If i set up a region where the video runs and a seperate region where the powerpoint runs, they'd both run simultaneously. What I was after doing is making something in photoshop, with a bit of info about the video, and then have the video sort of running within it. And then when the video's finished, move to the next slide which contains just static information.

Sorry if I'm being picky, and if i'm making no sense!!!! I'm not even sure this can be done, but you'd think with the price of these things that they'd be able to make it function however you wanted it?

Adam

[plexer]

You'd schedule mulitple things in the same regio i.e different videos or just loop the video?

Ben

[adamtate]

But would that give me an option to watch say 10 slides of my powerpoint in full screen and then watch one slide with a video overlaying it, then loop the whole project again? Sorry - I know i'm a bit thick when it comes to all this!

Adam

[penfold]

Couldn't you setup a powerpoint (your 10 slides) to run, then the video(2 mins) then loop back to the begining to show your powerpoint>video etc etc. You should be able to do this via the schedule on the samsung software?

[adamtate]

Right I see what you're saying. However, the content of the powerpoint changes on an almost daily basis, meaning some days it would take longer to run than others etc. If this was happening it would mean that the timings would have to be changed every day.

Any ideas? And thanks for all your help so far guys, I really do appreciate it!

[glennda]

I don't use powerpoint much (ever!) could you not embed the video to a UNC path and make sure everybody has access to read the video and then the powerpoint auto play the video?

The only problem with this is i don't know if powerpoint can handle the UNC paths

[SpuffMonkey]

We use iSpring to convert to flash and embed that. The MagicInfo software is truly a pile of poo and we're just about to install Xibo which should give us a lot more flexibility and improved scheduling.

[gshaw]

We use iSpring to convert to flash and embed that. The MagicInfo software is truly a pile of poo and we're just about to install Xibo which should give us a lot more flexibility and improved scheduling.

That's interesting, I'm weighing up whether to get the 400MX or MXN screens at the moment, depending on which it would either be MagicInfo on the MXN or something like a Revo running Xibo with the MX screen.

We're using Xibo on our old plasma at the moment and was wondering if MagicInfo was worth the £300 price difference between the screens... doesn't look like it at the moment Seems like MagicInfo still needs all the files held on a server as well in the library, as it stands I can't see any advantages over Xibo???