Software for an advertising screen
 

I am looking for software to run on a machine used to display videos and advertisements. Now I can play videos using mplayer, xine or vlc but the requirement needs to show messages at the bottom of the screen. The messages are scrolling text or small images, similar to what they show in BBC news.

Also I will have to play flash files. So I am thinking of using firefox for that.

Ideally I would like to have software which divides the screen into different blocks and show different programs in each of the block.

Is there any software to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Saura

Yeah, there are such programs, most people call them "Window Managers" :)
Try ratpoison - it won't draw any window headers or borders - just split your screen between different windows of any size.

Thanks for the solution. But for me the issue is, I cant position the windows manually all the time. So I have to write some scripts to start up the programs, when the system boots. Can I save the settings such that when I start mplayer1 it occupies the top 90% of the screen. When I run mplayer2 it should occupy the remaining 10%. Is something like this possible?

Once again thanks for your reply.

You don't have to worry about windows' size and position because in ratpoison you have screen divided into non-overlapping frames (well, you divide it into frames as you see fit) and any window launched in them occupies whole frame if it's capable of resizing at all.
You can also use command like 'ratpoison -c fdump > $HOME/.ratdump_$1', it'll dump all windows' frames and frames' layout to a file, and restore it at any time with 'ratpoison -c "frestore `cat $HOME/.ratdump_$1`"' so any launched windows 'll take the same position and size as they were when dumped.

In my tiny mind I see a series of framed html pages.

Too easy?

-sf