dual head video -vs- digital picture frame

[spikespiegal]

Friend of mine has a bar/restaurant, and wanted to use digital picture frames in strategic places for advertising specials, promotions, etc. Problem is, he wants big ones. Like, bigger than 19", which get absurdly expensive for digital picture frames.

He also has Windows PCs running his point of sale software all over the place. So, I'm thinking, dual head video card, regular 19-22" LCD, and just use the point of sale terminal to drive the other monitor with screen saver software. Since these will just be still images, there can't be much over-head to begin with.

Easily done?

 

[mpilchfamily]

It'll be hard to run the system to proses sales and run the screen saver at the same time. But you could run picture viewing software on the other monitor. But i think a separate system would be better. Then he could have 2 19" displays showing what he wants and not worry about it interfering with the sales machine.

 

[spikespiegal]

Explain to me why a dual core computer won't be able to handle running point of sale software that runs fine on a P300 with 128meg of RAM, and display 1024x768 JPEG stills?

 

[myocardia]

Umm, you can't use a computer (as in, input anything to it), with a screensaver running. Besides, if it's only outputting a static image, why would you want to use a screensaver? Besides those points, though, it would work just fine, as long as he's wanting to advertise fairly close to each POS terminal.

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: myocardia
Umm, you can't use a computer (as in, input anything to it), with a screensaver running.

This is the main problem. You'd have to find (or write) a piece of software to display images full screen on one display, while still being able to actually USE the computer. Most full-screen image viewers or slide shows take over the screen like a screensaver and you can't do anything else without stopping the show or returning the image viewer to a window. You could always just run the second display and use the picture/image/ad/whatever as the background - manually changing it when you want a new one displayed.

 

[jyjjy777]

There's plenty of image viewers with a full screen slideshow feature. Even a web browser(in full screen mode) and a simple flash app would work. There's no reason this software can't be run on one monitor, or even a large hdtv, while the other handles whatever including POS software. Even my old 6800 could handle stuff like this years ago.
There's even software that changes your desktop background picture at whatever interval you desire so you wouldn't need to run anything on the other monitor really.

 

[spikespiegal]

Even a web browser(in full screen mode) and a simple flash app would work.

Yeah....that's what I'm talking about. I'm using the term 'screen saver' a bit too broad here. I'm just referring to an app that will cycle still images on one head while the other handles the POS as always. Doesn't matter what the app is. I didn't think about the HTML route, but either a Flash or Java flipper would likely work.

Problem is I just don't use dual monitors much other than stretching my desktop. Wasn't aware of any pitfalls, although processing / GPU is far from one of them.

I just to avoid the price of a large photo frame.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: spikespiegal

Even a web browser(in full screen mode) and a simple flash app would work.

Yeah....that's what I'm talking about. I'm using the term 'screen saver' a bit too broad here. I'm just referring to an app that will cycle still images on one head while the other handles the POS as always.

Ahh, then it would work great. The Windows picture viewer will work perfectly in this case. Just put the pictures you want to display into a single folder, "bring up" the first one, and hit the F11 button. That would be all you'd need to do for each machine, and that only has to happen once per day.

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: myocardia

Originally posted by: spikespiegal

Even a web browser(in full screen mode) and a simple flash app would work.

Yeah....that's what I'm talking about. I'm using the term 'screen saver' a bit too broad here. I'm just referring to an app that will cycle still images on one head while the other handles the POS as always.

Ahh, then it would work great. The Windows picture viewer will work perfectly in this case. Just put the pictures you want to display into a single folder, "bring up" the first one, and hit the F11 button. That would be all you'd need to do for each machine, and that only has to happen once per day.

I just tried that in windows picture viewer. In Vista, at least, it snaps to the primary monitor when you hit F11. FF3 and IE7 stay on the monitor you put them on, but IE7 has a status bar (you can probably get rid of it in settings) and scroll bar showing. It also might resize images. I don't know what FF3 will do with images.

Your easiest bet will probably be an app to rotate desktop wallpapers on the secondary monitor, something like DisplayFusion