Is MediaPortal What I Need? (1 Viewer)

[Hackwood]

Hi there.
I work in a doctor's surgery as part of the NHS in the UK. We want to install a large screen TV/Monitor in our main waiting room with software that can manage TV news/Radio news Feeds, show our own Powerpoint presentations & announcements, picture-in-picture etc.
When looking at normal commercial setups in the UK this sort of thing seems to be very expensive (anywhere between £1-4K+!
I started to look around for open source stuff & came across MP.
On the surface it looks like MP can do this but before I put lots of effort into installing & testing, I thought I'd aim these queries at the forum to those of you who are the experts with the software.
Many thanks for any help you can provide.

 

[zicoz]

Personally I don't think MP is too well suited for this job.

- I don't think there is a way to view PP presentations inside MP, you would have to launch PP or another program to view these.
- There is no picture in picture support (maybe in MP 2.0?)

If you want to use MP it will be alot of manual labour, starting TV, starting a PP presentation, swapping back and forth, and I'm afraid you might not get the proffesional "look" you probably want for this setup. But then again I don't know how the commercial alternatives work. If you could point us towards one of those then we might be able to help some more.

 

[Hackwood]

Personally I don't think MP is too well suited for this job.

- I don't think there is a way to view PP presentations inside MP, you would have to launch PP or another program to view these.
- There is no picture in picture support (maybe in MP 2.0?)

If you want to use MP it will be alot of manual labour, starting TV, starting a PP presentation, swapping back and forth, and I'm afraid you might not get the proffesional "look" you probably want for this setup. But then again I don't know how the commercial alternatives work. If you could point us towards one of those then we might be able to help some more.

Hi Zicoz - Many thanks for your very useful reply. This link gives you an idea of what is out there Numed Holdings Ltd - Products - Envisage.

This provider is a medical equipment specialist & also provide links to your appoinment system to call the next patient to the relevant doctor. We don't want that. All we're really after is a large screen tv/monitor connected to a PC that will run a news feed from something like the UK's Freeview digital system (plenty of cards around for that) & in another area of the display a health presentation. In fact the more I think about this it might be possible to bring this all together in a web page. There are cheaper than the above in the market place but not by a lot.

 

[alank]

I love MP. But IMO it's not ready for business use.