Can a touchscreen monitor (12-15") be set to control a DVD player?

September 1, 2004 2:35 PM

Can a touchscreen monitor (12-15") be set to control a DVD player? (more inside)

I'm setting up a video display as part of a museum exhibit. The display will have four videos from which the visitor can select. In the past, when I've done stuff like this, I've used an all-in-one unit with a touchscreen monitor and a computer. Since this project is a little simpler, and is just going to be playing a DVD (rather than, say, having pictures and text to view), I though it might be easier to just run a DVD player and have it connected to a standalone touchscreen monitor. My question is whether DVD players have an input that can perform similar functions to those performed by the remote, and if so, what form does this input take? Thanks.

posted by faustessa to Technology (6 answers total)

Generally, no. You could conceivably, depending on how good you are with TTL electronics and what DVD player you have to work with, cobble up some hardware to use the "remote link" feature of some players. The down side, apart from having to build glue logic hardware, is that you'd also have to reverse engineer the remote link protocol used by your player of choice.

This would be approximately 9000% easier to do in software for most people.
posted by majick at 3:47 PM on September 1, 2004

I think majick is correct, although if you were willing to skip the touchscreen and just hack up and rewire the DVD remote control with four new buttons (probably the up, down, left and right controls) to control which video plays, that might be fairly easy.

Slightly related, the sony remote link protocol can be accessed with the slink-e (which I just found was discontinued when I went to the site **sigh**) but I don't know if there even are DVD players with s-link.
posted by milovoo at 5:12 PM on September 1, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks, majick and milovoo. I thought it was probably difficult with hardware; I just wanted to check.

OK, so let's say I use a PC to do this: is there software that will allow me to run an image of the DVD off the PC's hard drive (assuming the PC is running XP)? Is there any way to prevent users from clicking (touching) the X in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen to quit out of the DVD-playing software?
posted by faustessa at 5:43 PM on September 1, 2004

I don't know how to do the DVD image thing (on a PC), but as for limiting access to the system functions, there are probably quite a few, just search for Windows, Kiosk and DVD. These are the first two I found, they seem kind of expensive, there are probably plenty cheaper ones, also maybe check out windows media center (which is also expensive, but it might be worth it if you plan on doing this a lot) and maybe freevo (free but linux only).
posted by milovoo at 7:52 PM on September 1, 2004

DVD images should be pretty easy. If the DVD is unencrypted, just copy the VIDEO_TS folder to your hard drive and play that. If it is encrypted, well, there's this little thing called DeCSS going around...
posted by majick at 10:27 PM on September 1, 2004

Response by poster: The video is something I produced, so there are no encryption issues. Thanks so much for your help.
posted by faustessa at 11:37 PM on September 1, 2004