Better Uses for an LCD Screen

We’ve been doing this for the last week or so on a fairly irregular basis (mostly because I never seem to get into the school before noon). Pictured above is Danielle’s 9/11 video. This TV was originally installed (as legend has it) to screen advertising from Xerox, as they had offered free photocopying to the student population. Since then, the photocopier is out of toner and the TV itself hasn’t been turned on since the very beginning of the summer. Thinking it was a considerable waste to have it there and not showing anything (like student’s artwork for example), we had used this TV previously for playing Tetris.

Since then we’ve had a DVD player occasionally playing some of our own video works, but we’re certainly looking for more material to screen—let us know if you have anything!

We began thinking about how best to get a DVD connected and secured to the TV in the hallways of Lebel during our office hours a couple weeks ago.

For a brief moment we thought of having the DVD above the ceiling tiles, but the difficulty in accessing the player to change DVDs, etc. would have been too great.

Steven had kindly offered up his DVD player.

So, we set out to try hooking up Steven’s DVD player first, but it wasn’t interested in working with us. Instead we got another DVD player from Chris.

Chris’ DVD player worked and did so even while tilted. Hooking up the DVD player to the TV is really simple. There are RCA jacks on the right-hand side as well as a source button right above them. No remote needed.

We tidied up the cables and then let the DVD play. The best way to author a DVD for playback like this it to make is so that the last track or chapter will jump back to the first. That way, you don’t have to program it to repeat via remote. You can do this in DVD Studio Pro, but not sure how to in iDVD or Toast, etc.

Hopefully the TV will be used on a more regular basis.  Any ideas of what we should screen or a better way to make sure something is screening everyday?