Looking for rackmount digital video players

[welsmore]

Hi, I wonder if anyone can help me?

 

We run a number of conferences with unattended breakout rooms. The speakers have a 4-way VGA switch on stage to handle their own video requirements. What I'd like to do is to also have a rack-mount digital video player on each stage too, so once the speakers are finished, they can flip the switch to that input, which will run a looped mpeg video of advertising/still-to-come/etc.

 

So far we've used lots of things like this: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/2-5-HDD-Player-Enclo...%3A1|240%3A1318 or these: http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=227933

 

But what I'm really looking for is a rack mounted solution with physical keys, not a remote. I thought I'd struck gold from CPC with this: http://cpc.farnell.com/kam/pro5500-dvd-usb...-usb/dp/AV18463 but it turns out there is a reason it's so cheap! The VGA switches won't recognise the output and you can't turn off the OSD!! Has anyone found anything else like this on the market?

[Johnparrack]

3 manufacturers really...Doremi Nugget(http://doremilabs.com/nuggets.html), GVG Turbo (probably overspecced for what you need) and Blade iv (Cvs I think)

Probably many more available, depending on budget, but these should give you a place to start

Hth a little

[welsmore]

Thanks! That's exactly the sort of thing I'm after - just at a much lower price point! :P I guess I'll keep googling to see if there are any budget solutions. Bearing in mind the quality of the presentations (pretty shoddy all round), there just isn't any point in anything fancy for this application.

[henny]

take a look at http://www.pixels.uk.com/products/MedeaWiz/DV68.htm

 

no local control as such, but just stick in a card and power on, no control needed

[jason5d]

try ebay

 

I got a dorame for £50

[DangerousMark]

I wanna know where you're gonna get speakers from with the brains/willpower/memory to actually do that ... you may wanna automate it instead.

 

Ours can't handle switching inputs all that well in the first place, or hitting a "PLEASE TURN OFF" switch at the end of their presentations let alone triggering an advertising thing :blink:

 

There's some thing called POV-NG that we're trying out for digital signage - can't get it to work at the moment ourselves, but it could maybe do the thing you want. Have everything go thru the PC rather than splashing out on a whole extra DV player just for that purpose.

 

If you are set on it, and the system already has a DVD player or you have the option of adding another (£15 from Tesco job for example), sounds like your requirements could be perfectly satisfied - particularly if it IS an MPG - by throwing the thing together in some basic DVD authoring package (e.g. iMovie, or something like Nero or whatever else gets bundled with the less cheapskate retail boxes for DVD burners) and burn to DVDR, or RW if it's going to change often. Make sure you can specify that your looping video will start immediately on insertion, then when it's finished will loop round (i.e. redirects back to itself). Hook it into the switcher, power on, insert disc, fuggedabowdit. Changing over the material is reduced to burning a new disc, and swapping it in for the old one. And if it dies you can always slap the disc in the PC and have the presenter eject and reclose the DVD drive tray when they're done so it'll autorun.

 

Heck if you really want to be scrappy or your source MPG isn't high quality there's probably innumerable walkman-type VCD players going for a quid on ebay. My brother had one... video quality isn't stunning (think "videoconference"), but they tend to be able to do DVD quality still-frames with sound. (If the source is REALLY LQ, it might be VCD spec already :blink:).

 

Another alternative: network digital video player. Like the hard disc/memory card ones but you can hook it up to the LAN and just stream new videos to it as required.