application development

We are looking for a party which can develop the following application for a reasonable price: Functionality: Retrieving information about content from a MySQL database and displaying content on several plasmascreens connected to one computer: We need an application that retrieves information about available content from an MySQL database (on the local computer) and that content should be displayed on one or more connected plasmascreens. The MySQL database contains several tables which contain information about content that has to be displayed on the plasmascreens. This Information concerns location of the files on the local harddisk, and several rules (e.g. date and time range when content is allowed to be displayed, maximum and minimum times the content is allowed to be shown on the sceens in total and per screen per day etc.). Concerning this, the following should be taken into account: - The content can be of different types (e.g. jpg, gif, swf, avi, mpeg etc.). - between showing content there should be a nice random fade function - In case of a movie or flash file, the application itself should determine the length of the movie/file in order to start the next content in time. For static content (e.g. images) a display length time for that specific content is defined in the MySql database. -it should be possible to connect multiple screens to one computer. In case of multiple screens, per screen different content will be shown. - it should be able to use multiple video cards and multiple audio cards. Suppose we deliver a PlayerComputer with 1x AGP videocard, 1x OnBoard Audio, and 6 PCI Slots, it should be possible te use three PCI slots with a videocard and three with a audio card. In that case every screen of total 4 screens has it own audio channel. On the other hand, When the customer doesn't want to have audio on all the screens, it should be possible to use for example AGP and 5 PCI slots for video en just one PCI and onboard audio for audio. In that case the audio should automaticaly be directed to the first screens. I mean the screens which show the content that in the SQL database is scheduled to be displayed on screen 1 and 2. - different sceens show different content. When showing content on a specific screen several rules should be taken into account which are defined in the MySQL database. - Everytime just before a content is done playing a new query should be done to the MySQL database to get real-time information about content and displaying rules for that screen at that time, to select which content is alowed to be shown next on that specific screen. If there are more the one content available for displaying next, one should be randomly picked. - The movies can be rather big files, but speed of the system is verry important. Movies should be shown smoothless up to at least 4 screens. additional information: - the application should run as a service. It should start imediately after starting up the PC. - The content should be shown full screen - It would be nice if the application is compatible with both Linux as wel as Windows. But only one platform is open for discussion. It all depends on best suitable and cheapest solution. - In case of windows: after starting the computer, the application will automatically start as a service. Content will be shown full screen. The windows environment is not visible in any way. The application can not be quitted, so the windows environment is not reachable. The only way to minimize or shut down the application is by pressing hot keys or typing a password. Then the standard windows environment will be shown. This can only be done by our technician. - There should be a setup or configuration utility to configure the player. The setup or configuration program can only be started by a person who knows the hot-key combination or the password to escape the display application. He will be able to reach the windows environment and start the configuration utility. In this utility: a. New Hot keys or password to quit from the application can be defined b. There will be more settings available in configuration utility while this project goes on. Option 1: The application should be able to display also php pages between the images and movies. If that is not possible we should consider to develop some sort of background process which opens the php page, makes a screens shot and let the apllication display the screenshot. Option 2: It would be nice if the can be one or more fixed positions to display text on top of the displayed movie or image. So when retrieving content from the MySQL database the will be three extra fields Text1, text2, text3 which will be shown on the fixed positions on top of the content. So, in short the isue is to get info from a database and controlling a motherboard (retrieving the sound and video cards) and push information to the connected peripherals. We contacted another party who came up with the following two options: "- the first one is a java stand alone client (platform independent) made with swing that is taking care about the functionalities you requested. For the java client we can use JNI (java native interface) package in order to access the DirectX components (only win dependent) for playing the video and audio files, or JMF (java media framework) and JAI (java advance imaging) to control directly the multimedia files. - the second solution and the ideal one is to make a Visual C++ MFC application which will only work on windows platforms. Here we have all the functions necessary to "play" with DirectX and DirectDraw (for the effects between the database items) and to work on the interruption level for controlling the video and sound card." Hopefully this gives you some ideas. If there are any further questions please contact me. Since we are a small starting company and we want to have to application developed before it's being sold, a low price, but also a good solution is very important.