displaying a show reel on plasma

[Tad lighting]

Hi all,

 

 

I am new to the media side.

been working with lighting and rigging only.

 

someone has asked me to rig, a plasma to a truss stand.

(no problems)

 

but they want to display a company showreel, without the need to leave a laptop there.

as it is a public area, for security reasons.

 

Iam using some 42inch panasonic plasma's

they do not have a media card, they only have vga connection port.

 

Ive been thinking about somesort of media harddrive to store and play the media from?

 

 

one of the media is a presentation on apple, (something in imovies)

 

can anyone help?

 

thanks in advance

[Peter F]

You might struggle a bit for choice because you only have VGA input available to you.

Before you go much further with this I suggest just checking the Plasma once again to make absolutely certain there aren't any other inputs. Most of the cheap media player options have HDMI / Composite / Component outputs.

 

If, you are correct about having only VGA input(and I don't doubt you will be) then the simplest option might be to purchase a very basic VESA mount PC. VESA is the mounting that you get for flat screen TV's.

Something like this:

 

VESA Mount PC

 

There are others, search for VESA mount PC.

 

Cheers,

 

Peter

[AHYoung]

if you dont need any better than sd, just take whatever they ngive you and author a dvd. a lot of cheapo players will happily run on their sides, just give it a try and see. its also worth avoiding anything with a "***** budget range" screensaver. connect the dvd to composite video in and as long as you have authored the disk to auto play and loop all will be well. ive yet to see a display either domestic or commercial that didnt have a composite video input so this should be possible.

 

a better solution and costing a couple hundred quid, id recomend either digital view http://www.digitalview.com/products/viewstream100-digital-media-player or brightsign http://www.brightsign.biz/products/hd110.php both output on vga and both are capable of basic scheduling functions which may be handy as you mention different files. or you can load a/an mpg/s onto a card and it plays forever. We have used both with no failures for various jobs and they just work . also small enogh to tuck behind the mount for the screen.

 

Id stay away from using a small pc as its a pc and pcs break particulartly when running video files. any glitch on the power and goodbye, with a media player, it just restarts with no interaction.

 

 

 

 

[nickb12345]

connect the dvd to composite video in

 

they only have vga connection port.

 

Another option is use a couple of VGA->CAT5 adaptors and then you can hide the laptop or pc somewhere secure.

 

Nick