AVTechy

If you have a Matrox capture card 'realtimechromakey' is a small .exe that worked great during one of our open days. Sadly this does require Matrox hardware but enabled curious parents and pupils to walk in front of a bluescreen and see a projection of themselves visiting places like the Taj Mahal, and the Grand Canal without moving a footstep! PM me if you do have matrox hardware and I'll send you files for you to try.

I was trying to think of the name of that little exe - vidcap! I also recommend that for its simplicity - it also allows tweaking for webcam settings.

That's an interesting read Fiza, this was useful to me so thanks for the info. I've been testing out Xibo for a bit and quite liked the system which is certainly powerful and very flexible, but it does get complex once you start getting into user account permissions and schedules, particularly with more than a few screens. It also seems a little 'laggy' from time to time, although I've not really played with it that much to try and resolve it. I'll have to give Concerto a go to see what that can do - user friendliness is always a time saver! Shame about the lack of video support, but I don't even know what our staff want to display yet.

VLC or media player classic can do this. For MPC just run the standalone file and click file > open device. Provided your camera's drivers are installed, it should show in the list. I'm sure it's similar in VLC which is also higly rated. I know with MPC you can select to save images in JPG, BMP or PNG format too. Hope this helps!

Might be a bit obvious - but when you plug it in, is it in play mode rather than record?

Hi all. I've also been assigned to implementing a cost effective solution to provide concurrent signage across 20 screens over our site. From what I've seen and tested of Xibo so far, I'm really impressed with the outcome. Small footprint, and easy to get going once you're over the server & client installation and setup (which was still pretty straightforward with a couple of forum hints & regfixes). I love the fact that this was free and we could provide an effective solution which would have taken just a little training to staff who were updating the content. Sadly I was later informed we were going to be using Adobe AIR streams instead. What this entails exactly I am yet to find out as I'm not overly keen on Adobe products, even though I'm forced to use them from time to time! I noticed they have an app for smart TVs and some signage apps too, but there's not a lot on their description. Anyone care to outline how an AIR stream would work? From what I've read it could be just an SWF stream which would obviously not be as efficient as Xibo. Then again, AIR looks like it could be a powerful solution which uses custom apps (there are 3 for signage already), which could just run in a similar way to xibo. Anyone else had experience using AIR for this kind of thing? The management weren't too specific about the AIR stream so from what I'm gathering so far, it could either be an SWF stream, or something completely different. Sorry, don't mean to hijack this thread btw, but for the record - Xibo was good and cheap! Downsides to a lot of other solutions is that you need custom hardware. With Xibo, all you need are a screen and a mini-pc (I found these tiny little 'Zotac' boxes which look perfect). Thanks for any opinions / help!

Hahaa, yes that ultimate test of time! I'll probably be back here at some point then

This has made for some interesting reading. Our new site has a lot of these units in place and I'm disheartened to hear they have such a high failure rate. I do however see you can get a retro fit for the unifi55 onto older boards which may be an option if I start to encounter the same issues. What are people's experience with the 55 models? I hear they're a lot better. Interesting read about DLP projection too. I understand they rely a lot more on mechanics for picture & colour but it didn't sway our decision to go with our lovely Sanyo PDG-DHT100L. It's a very nice bit of kit, colour is fantastic and it's very reliable once set up correctly, particularly with the 2-lamp system and 'automatic' filters. So far it has paid for itself (which I should add was a rather extortionate amount), with use by film societies, conferences, productions etc everyone has been nothing but happy, although not quite as bright as one could hope. An excellent complement to our theatre... (sorry, I'm just bragging now)

It could be that your camera's sound output needs adjustment. Try switching to 48KHz/44.1KHz, or 12bit or 16bit - I often got that when working with different canon camera models. Similar adjustments in the importing software can affect it too. Best of luck

CCCP is good, but a little slow on development imo. VLC is a good, highly configurable player too, but I don't feel it's as user friendly as media player classic. They're all pretty good though and often come with deployment friendly installers.

On our site we like to use K-Lite codec pack. Set the installer to run with the -makeunattended flag and it'll create the appropriate msi with all of your finely chosen settings. For apple formats we just use iTunes, but if given the choice, I would have went with Quicktime alternative.

Hi all, first post in these forums, long time edu-worker b ut mainly for a/v related jobs. My experience with coomber has been rather poor over the past 4 years. We bought a batch of red 2016 tape recorders about 7 years ago, and within 2 years they all developed the same issue. They refused to accept it was a faulty batch and although we had a visit from the head honcho himself the issues still remaiined unexplained even though all of the units purchased at the same time developed the same problem. Secondly, we foolishly went ahead and bought another 5 of their 363x recorders only to realise they not only didn't include instructions on how to fix a CD , they finally released a PDF which explained how, but now with several media types - it falsely reports that CDs have been fixed which subsequently refuse to play in normal CD players. I have tried countless software to try and fix/finalise these discs/tracks/sessions (which clearly show the session is still open) but to no avail. They still have not acknowledged my email regarding this matter and for nearly £300 a unit I expected more, particularly as these are being used for GCSE/A-Level and IB exams... poor show coomber!