Dynamic Images

The WATCHOUT Dynamic Image Server is a separate program that allows you to incorporate up-to-date text, images and graphics into your presentation. It renders the requested images, and sends the result to your display computers via the network. This is somewhat similar to the way a VNC Server provides images for a “Computer Screen” media item, but provides greater flexibility and programmability.

Being a server application, the program doesn’t offer much in terms of user interface. It simply runs on a computer connected to the network and responds to image requests from WATCHOUT. Using the commands on the File menu, you can manually open local files and URLs to preview them on screen. Images are also displayed while they’re being served to WATCHOUT.

IMPORTANT: As the Image Server runs as a separate application, it requires its own WATCHOUT license key.

Image Types

The Image Server can serve three types of content:

• A still image
• A web page, based on standard HTML5 components
• A SWF file (Adobe Flash)
• Desktop

For still images, the Image Server accepts JPEG and PNG and TIFF formats. It supports transparency information in PNG and TIFF images, as well as in HTML and Flash content. See “Add Dynamic Image” for more details on how to configure this media type.

Alternate File Location

By default, local image files are served from a folder relative to the location of the Image Server application. If you want to keep your dynamic images elsewhere, pass the -f command line parameter to the Image Server application to specify the location of the folder. Put this option into a shortcut used to start the image server, possibly located in the Startup folder of the computer, so that the shortcut’s Target field resembles the example below:

“C:\WATCHOUT\ImageServer\ImageServer.exe” -f D:\DynImages

If the image folder path contains spaces, enclose it within double-quotes too.