Hi All - I do tech support at a large urban high school near Portland Oregon. We currently use our antiquated cable-TV system to broadcast weekly news and events to 32" and 50" flatpanel TVs around the school. We want to move to a more flexible solution using our wired network infrastructure. Goal would be to use the Pi's as media receivers at each TV panel to pickup streamed content from a media server. The media server would be a robust PC running Linux (I'm guessing) continuously streaming a 5 - 10 minute loop of material. We use media creation tools to roll powerpoint slides + photos + video clips into a single movie file -- and then that is looped for several days to a week.
We've mocked this up in the past year using Intel Atom based Nettops running Win7 and being streamed to from a PC running Win7 - but the Nettops are a bit expensive and Win7 seems like overkill to just be a media receiver. I've already got a Pi and have been fiddling with it a bit and am comfortable using Linux and the command line -- but I'm not a heavy media user so I'm seeking help here. THANKS for any and all guidance and help.