Video Interactives - I

We began assembling our digital video interactives this week. 2 video kiosks will be a part of the exhibit with 16 videos, 8 per interactive, available at each station. The videos will be displayed on 22" LCD screens wall mounted above the information/selection stations.
To store, play and control the video there are 4 simple and essential components:



The DV66 playback device is a simple and economical solution to meet museum video needs. 2 of the biggest advantages are that it does not use any moving parts as it is designed to playback 24/7, the other being that playback resumes automatically upon power-up. It is capable of playing up t0 99 files in sequence. The DV66 can be plugged into a/v, s-video and vga plugs.


On the inside several limited options are selectable through 6 Dip switches: NTSC/Pal, Aspect ratio, Looping the first file/playing in sequence and a few others.


Video is stored on a seperatly bought Compact Flash card up to 4 Gigabytes. After some trial and error we found that using DVD MPEG-2 with AC3 audio in letterbox format gave the most reliable and best results.



The DV66 can run on its own simply scrolling through the files on the CF card, or an external controller can be connected to it. We used the DV66K, however it has been discontinued and the more versatile TV-66K is available for the same function and more.


The DV66K has 8 push buttons onboard or external switches can be wired into the screw ports for remote control of the video files, which is what we need for our interactive illuminating switches.


The switches have LED lights inside which will have to be wired up to a separate power supply.



The exposed posts on the bottom-side of the switches are the available connections to the LEDs



Once the switches are connected the white (common ground) wire must be separated and wired into terminal "0" the coloured wire is then screwed into the appropriatly numbered terminal: switch # 1,2,3,4....



If there is insufficient space in terminal "0" (like we have run into here, an adaptation will have to be made to accommodate the 8 wires.