* We have a total of 6 42" plasmas hung on walls in high student-traffic
areas on campus (both dining rooms in the cafeteria, both entrances in one
of our classroom building, both entrances in our other classroom building).
* Each plasma is near a network drop with a Cat-5e cable run to the main
switch closet for the building.
* In each switch closet we have an old PC running Windows XP with Windows
Media Player and PowerPoint Player installed. The also have Real VNC
installed for remote control. The NIC on this computer is connected to our
LAN.
* The VGA port on the computer is connected to a simple Y-splitter and the
two ends of the VGA-Y are connected to video-over-cat5 boxes. For the life
of me, I cannot right now remember the name of the company that makes the
boxes, but they come in pairs, and the box has a VGA port and an RJ-45 port.
One box goes at the computer end and converts the VGA to RJ-45 and the other
end converts back to VGA and connects to the remote monitor (in our case,
the plasma screen).
* Thus, we have three networked workstations that display their screen on
the plasmas. The workstations are controlled remotely with VNC and have an
account that is set to auto-logon that mounts a network share.
We just edit a PowerPoint on the server, and then remote in to the three
workstations and double-click the PowerPoint which then launches in PP
Player.
When we want to show video (live or on-demand) we just point Windows Media
Player at the source stream from our Windows Media Streaming server and the
plasmas show the video (no audio though).
The only expense for us was the cost of the plasmas and the cost of the
VGA-Cat5 convertor boxes. It does take a little bit of effort to manage and
it's not super-dynamic, but it works well for us. Particularly when the Red
Sox have day games :-)
Christopher
--
Christopher Butler
Academic Technology Director
St. John's Preparatory School
http://www.stjohnsprep.org
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