Low-cost controlled tv do it yourself

Hello, all lovers to do something yourself. Now I will tell a small case that takes place in one of Moscow's universities, in which I am something like a head of advertising.
So, a couple of years ago, the idea was born in the minds of several of our students - to create a distributed media space. Part of this media space, it was decided to make the university television. The prerequisites were as follows:

• The amount of visual content increases exponentially. Now every 3rd person has a reflex camera, and many (even in our technical college) earn money by doing so. But the content sees 1-2 people. Because of this, students very rarely learn about past / upcoming events, and in general they know little about cultural (and not so) living in high school.
• Dot-addressable panels allow you to play the role of interactive information boards, which will reduce paper damage and create interesting and memorable announcements / informational messages.

Since our university does not have a surplus of funds for the purchase of such panels (and this is not the most expensive), we had to come up with something more flexible and, at the same time, functional. As we see, the minimum cost of such a panel is 60,000 rubles. This includes 40 inches of happiness, with not Full HD resolution, even, and the Athlon X2. We are repelled from this amount, but we will expand the characteristics at least to support Full HD.
So, for a start, let's figure out what we want to broadcast:

• I want a photo slide show that is not played by any standard viewer, but is interactive. The general point is simple - there is a web gallery from which, reading RSS, links to photos and their meta descriptions (names, author, etc.) are caught, after which the photos are output via Dip to Black or Crossfade transitions.
• I want flash video streams to be played with overlays (layers). For what I need it: in due time, one of the students developed a system for storing video files with a web interface. The point was simple - we dump a DV-AVI file into a daddy on the server (via SMB), the system eats it and gives a flash video (like on YouTube, only the server was in the next room). Again, indexing by events and several more important fields. More than 10 TB of video content passed through this system, which can be used for broadcasting through this very system of intra-university television. In the future, there were plans to teach her to eat everything (and Full HD too), which is only possible, but her hands never reached.
• I want static ad frames to be put in there. Often there is a task to make a quick static announcement that will hang for several hours on television panels.

So, after we understand that we want to broadcast, we need to understand which technique will allow us to do it cheaply and flexibly. After a couple of daily brainstorming sessions, it was revealed that unpretentious LG panels (Looks like these ) for 18,500 would suit us, and they decided to choose Acer Veriton 282G as control devices (at the time of implementation of the whole program, they were the only ones in their class with Ion2 and at an affordable price ). One moment is negative - everything is implemented on Windows, since * nix systems have “some” problems with playing FullHD flash with overlays. Roughly speaking, they are very slow. Tests revealed that on Win7 with Aero cut down and other FullHD pribludy, the flash with layers is played more than satisfactorily. The price of one such nettop (which, by the way, is very presentable hanging on the TV) is now around 10,000 rubles. We add here the cost of Win7 (which, by the way, for student needs can also be obtained by MSDNAA), then, in the end, we get 14,000. For MSDNAA owners, it will cost even less.
So, for 32,500, we get a full-fledged system that can play FullHD flash with layers and rejoice that we saved almost half the cost of the conditionally-worst option.
Next came the software part.
What we already have:

• Video storage system, from where we need to somehow catch only the files we need.
• Photo gallery from which we take photos with descriptions.
• File storage to which we have access without authorization.

What do we need:

• A system that will realize the playback of video files from the repository at certain intervals, while you need to create an adequate web interface with a schedule, where you can easily and simply add videos that you like to us at the required intervals.
• The same system should play photos from the gallery, with the overlay to let the information about the author and the name of the image.
• It should also snatch from the schedule information about blocks of static video files that will need to be broadcast at certain intervals.

Now, actually, after we figured out what we want, and how much it will cost us in terms of hardware, we can move on to implementing the software that implements this functionality. If it’s interesting, I’m ready to tell you in detail on what and how the pieces of this system are implemented in the second part.

Thanks for attention.