Showing from one machine on another.

[mpe]

We have a visually impared student arriving next term.
They apparently won't be able to see the board easily.
Whilst they have been supplied with a laptop we need a method of sending whatever is on the teacher's machine to their laptop.
This needs to be under the control of the teacher.
Typically software either works the wrong way around, needing a connection to be initiated from the viewing end. or comes with complex/expensive licencing structures more designed for one "teacher" to take control of several student machines.

What's needed for this situation is for an arbitrary number of machines to be able to send to one machine. If several try to send in turn the student's machine should display the most recent sender.

[pete]

Does the kid also need to work on the laptop during the lesson? Say alt-tab between what's on the board and a word document or whatever? Or is it purely being used as a "magnifier"?

[LeMarchand]

Had the same thing needed at one of my schools. Not there @ present, but I think I used UltraVNC, set to start with Windows. Not exactly what you want, but it's free! Not had any problems reported with it, but I have a feeling that the student (and the teacher!) was happier using the board...

Of course, there was only one teacher for the pupil to connect to, so it made things fairly easy to set up.

iTalc may be worth looking at - let me know if it's any good!

[pete]

Another thought would be to connect one of the vga outs on the back of the room(s) projector to a wireless sender and equip the kid's laptop with a receiver.

[mpe]

Another thought would be to connect one of the vga outs on the back of the room(s) projector to a wireless sender and equip the kid's laptop with a receiver.

Can you get these to take VGA, which is effectivly RGB and separate syncs, or do they expect composite video (YUV+composite sync)?

Also the only way I could see to make sure that the reciever would only pick up the transmitter in the same room would be to use IR rather than RF.

[LeMarchand]

Can you get these to take VGA, which is effectivly RGB and separate syncs, or do they expect composite video (YUV+composite sync)?

Also the only way I could see to make sure that the reciever would only pick up the transmitter in the same room would be to use IR rather than RF.

Maplins do VGA senders w. USB receivers that they say are best as line-of-sight, but they're £100 each...

Looking at it properly, they may only work the other way - sorry!

[mpe]

Does the kid also need to work on the laptop during the lesson? Say alt-tab between what's on the board and a word document or whatever? Or is it purely being used as a "magnifier"?

Probably best if they can't do anything else with the machine whilst the teacher is showing the whatever on the board. Then they can "switch off" the sending. If they forget to do this at the end of the lesson then they need to get "bumped" by the next teacher.

[mpe]

Had the same thing needed at one of my schools. Not there @ present, but I think I used UltraVNC, set to start with Windows. Not exactly what you want, but it's free! Not had any problems reported with it, but I have a feeling that the student (and the teacher!) was happier using the board...

Of course, there was only one teacher for the pupil to connect to, so it made things fairly easy to set up.

That's never going to happen in a secondary school

iTalc may be worth looking at - let me know if it's any good!

Looking at the manual it appears to do lots of things which arn't really much use to the task in hand.

[localzuk]

ABTutor control could potentially do what you want, but it is £199 per teacher workstation.

[mpe]

ABTutor control could potentially do what you want, but it is £199 per teacher workstation.

Which would equate to something like two and a half grand for something which MAY do the job. At this kind of price paying someone to alter VNC might well be cheaper. But I don't have any idea how to get in contact with Windows developers.

[Chillibear]

I'd just use TightVNC and set the input handling on the server (teacher) to block all remote input events. That way the student (client/viewer vnc) can't control the teacher's (server) computer, just watch. You could also have the client set in listen mode then the teacher can initiate the connection.

However automating the whole process might be a hassle - although there are tools to script things on Windows pretty easily. Looking at the iTALC software suggested by LeMarchand it would seem to do everything you want - probably built on top of the VNC source

Final thought would be to stream the teacher's PC output as a video. Plenty of choices to do that, although I always found Unreal (Unreal Media Server download) to be good, they do a DirectShow desktop capture driver to get the desktop view which could then be streamed to the client.

[mac_shinobi]

Am sure impero can achieve this ?

Impero - Features

Great price and supports a lot of stuff.

[SYNACK]

Here's an idea that is kind of different from the above but may work quite well. Install Windows Media Player Encoder on the teacher workstations and Windows Media Server Services on one of your servers. Set up a profile for the encoder that points the output stream at the server when an icon is clicked and put this on the teacher workstations. Setup the server to take an input stream from any of these clients ans rebroadcast it on a specific URL.

Lastly setup the laptop to point to this URL and load media player in full screen when the laptop is logged in.

[caffrey]

this what you need ? - not tried it myself TightProjector: Broadcast Screen Over the Network

[torledo]

Here's an idea that is kind of different from the above but may work quite well. Install Windows Media Player Encoder on the teacher workstations and Windows Media Server Services on one of your servers. Set up a profile for the encoder that points the output stream at the server when an icon is clicked and put this on the teacher workstations. Setup the server to take an input stream from any of these clients ans rebroadcast it on a specific URL.

Lastly setup the laptop to point to this URL and load media player in full screen when the laptop is logged in.

would you be using a directshow capture filter similar to the one as detailed in an above post for capturing/encoding what has happening on the desktop of the teacher workstation. sorry not familiar with how WME captures screen activity.