I haven’t installed Xibo yet as I’m researching digital signage type things. We currently just use Powerpoint but our images are just static with no animation or anything. I’m wondering if there’s a way to save the slides as images and if Xibo can just run them as a slideshow. If not, what is the best way to change Powerpoint to Xibo without installing Powerpoint on the host?
We change slides relatively often so I know we could save the whole show as a video each time but I’d rather not have to do that. I guess I could save each image as a really short video but that seems like a lot of extra work.
I would highly recommend installing Xibo and playing with it a bit. Xibo has regional timelines on layouts. The regional timelines allow for a range of different types of media, such as video, images, datasets and webpages.
I would think for what you are wanting, saving the slides as jpg’s would be the way to go. Upload and assign the images to the regional timeline, and then arrange them in the desired order.
You would not have interactive control over the playback, such as pause or displaying the next image at will. But if you just want to play the slides in a certain order with a predetermined amount of time for each slide, Xibo can do it.
That sounds like exactly what we need. Show each image for XX seconds, fade to the next one, repeat forever. I just didn’t see anything about slideshows when I searched except for people hacking it by using videos as slideshow and things like that.
I’m not sure that I’d classify it as a “hack” but we use mainly swf files which staff members at this large school with practically no training can create using freely available tools with a powershell script providing a user friendly interface for upload/image file creation/upload… and, behind the scenes, emailing IT Support advising that they’ve done it.
Movie Maker (also free) can also do the video file creation from images/videos etc but a little more training is required and teachers are busy enough with marking, reports, lesson preparation & sports training so a simple solution is necessary
Of course if you manage the signs on your own then there are probably more elegant ways to do this but videos work well in our environment.