[K12OSN] Retrieve DVD Player via Yum

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2004-03-03 at 12:15, Jim Kronebusch wrote:

> I thought this idea was a good start to figuring out how Linux could be
> used to provide a lower dollar solution to K12 or even Colleges.  I am
> not really thinking of using this locally in the same lab but more for a
> campus wide distribution (otherwise a local projector would be far
> better than sending to clients).  I don't know if you could build a box
> with multiple source inputs and let users select from them through a
> terminal and display them remotely or not with some sort of gui with
> dropdowns.  It just got the wheels turning.  Someone with far more
> knowledge than myself could probably make pretty good money if they
> could package such a system.

Videolan has already done it: http://www.videolan.org/ and any
lan set up for k12ltsp should already have enough bandwidth if
the vlc client runs as a local app on the terminal and items
with multiple watchers are streamed as multicast from a server.
It does take a pretty good workstation to display full screen
video - probably in the PIII 800+ range.

I'd try two different approaches.  One would be for the one-off
viewers where you just copy the data onto a big file server.  The
legal issues are going to be more complicated here than the
technical ones or even the price.  There are programs around that
will copy DVD's into disk files and VLC or some other viewers will
play them nicely.  There are VLC clients for windows/mac/linux
so if you toss a few hundred gigs of disk on a samba server and
add appropriate media files, that part is done - but keep in mind
that anyone who can view the files can also copy them.

The other approach is for streaming sources and things that
many terminals watch at once.  For those you need to set up
the VideoLan server and use multicast to conserve bandwidth
but the same client would be used to view it.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com