Sunday, March 17, 2024

Reviving an unused Pharmacy Digital Display System to display custom advertisements


  • There is an unused Medical Advertisement system in a pharmacy nearby. 
  • This system would show many medical ads on local medical services; hospitals, medicines etc.
  • Since a long time now it has been switched off and unused "perfectly working" things cause a lot of botheration.
  • Got the Mukesh Medicals Pharmacy owner interested in reviving it so that it could be repurposed to show other things: custom ads, local information, products on offer etc.
  • The hardware turned out to be an MP4 player with a VGA out connection.
  • Good deal of time was spent in experimenting in encoding a suitable video that could be run on the System as it was 10+ years old and many codecs and features have evolved and cannot be run on older systems. Also the file structure on the storage device also played a part in the video operation. The earlier system keeps a record of how long and how often a particular ad has been played for payment purposes and this feature couldn't be changed.
  • There was a need to play a video of the local products that had offers and also show a welcome message to the patrons of the Pharmacy.
  • The below video shows the intended outcome 

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