Video Server / player

[AndrewR]

Which version of media player are you running? I'm using version 11, which seems very stable. And supports HD video formats that quicktime didn't!

[Tomo]

Which version of media player are you running? I'm using version 11, which seems very stable. And supports HD video formats that quicktime didn't!

In my experience, it's not actually the quality / stability (or lack thereof) that was the issue.

 

It's the godawful user interface.

 

In a conference situation, you do not want anyone to see your user interface - which mean you need a seperate control window to the playback window, so you can have one on the local screen and the other on the projector.

Unfortunately, WMP doesn't seem to allow for that.

[dbuckley]

In a conference situation, you do not want anyone to see your user interface - which mean you need a seperate control window to the playback window, so you can have one on the local screen and the other on the projector.Unfortunately, WMP doesn't seem to allow for that.

Thats not quite true; it does support it, but you need to do shout at WMP through APIs programmatically to do it. Thats exactly how the PCStage MediaSync plugin works; its WMP but without the standard WMP user interface, so you can have control on one screen, output on another. Unfortunately (I think this was the thread) for some reason PCStage crashed the OP's machine, which is way uncool..

 

http://www.davidbuckley.name/pix/mediasync.jpg

 

Here we are playing our very own Mr Riff on the second monitor. If you choose to have the display on the same screen as the controller the image appears in the area where the upper gray window is, which is good enough for testing and setting events. Events for the clip are shown in the bottom white window. The plugin reponds to commands from PCStage, so it can be driven straight off a cuelist. When the clip isn't playing, the secondary screen is set to black, so you can drive a projector directly and it looks OK. I've left the preferences dialog open to illustrate second monitor setting. Yep, its all done with WMP.

[Nick S]

I want some thing that is as basic as media player / real player. That works rather than crashing and complaining about not having the right set of Codec’s loaded and so on.

 

[snip] I want some thing as basic as double clicking the file and pressing play really!

 

Have a look at VideoLAN - it's an open source media player, that handles prettty much every codec known to man (WMV support ropey, but I know few people who'd WMV out of choice). It's also very stable, as long as you're using an established codec. It also has numerous features sutiable for use in a conference environment.

 

It's not the best thing in the world, but it's free and highly capable.

[johnkendall]

I've used PowerDVD to good effect for this. It has seperate playback and control windows, just drag and drop the Playback window to monitor 2, and then hit full-screen.

 

Been using it for about 3 or 4 years on corporate events.

 

HTH

John