Tutorial - News Tickers with Dise RSS Reader
RSS news is a news file format that has become widely available. Many newspapers or other content providers can deliver their news in a readable format. Many solutions for corporate intra nets can also output RSS news which can be used for corporate TV.
Since the format is text based it should not be to complicated to include in a presentations. However RSS is a file format that can include so much more than just the actual news. This formats needs to be interpreted before it can be displayed.
We have created DISE RSSReader which is an application that can download news from multiple RSS feed providers and create simple text files that can be placed anywhere on your hard drive or network. After this conversion these RSS news can be used by Dise Composer and Replay to playback automatic news.
Here is what you do to include a RSS feed as a ticker in a presentation.
Step 1 - Install and start the Dise RSS Reader application. You are presented with the following window.
Step 2 - Stop any automatic download in progress by pressing the Stop button. Then select Add to create a new RSS feed link.
You will then see the RSS Reader Settings dialog box below.
Step 3 - Name your RSS site and fill in the edit boxes based on your RSS feed. I have used a feed from CNN in this example. You can also use and set optional parameters such as Text before and after the actual news and you can select to use an error message if a news feed cannot be found.
The final thing you need to specify is the output text file where your interpreted news will be saved.
Step 4 - Press test to see if your feed is working. Then press OK.
Step 5 - Back in the main window you can press start and your selected RSS feed will be interpreted and a preview displayed in the window. This feed will update your text file every 5 minutes or as often as you enter in the Update Interval edit box keeping your news up to date.
Now we are ready to move on to Dise Composer and
Step 6 - Start Dise Composer and create a simple presentations. Here I have used a preset called TV Channel News from the Dise Content available from the display evolution web site. This preset includes a ticker object which says Enter text here. If you create your own scene then create a text ticker object and select edit selected objects from the menu as explained below.
Step 7 - Select the text ticker object by clicking on it.
Step 8 - Then select edit selected object from the menu to edit ticker settings
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Step 9 - This will bring up the Edit ticker dialog box. Here you can set ticker specific settings and also choose to connect the ticker text to an external text file. This is done by selecting the Connect Data Button. Click the Connect Data button which will bring up the Text file data connection dialog box.
Step 10 - In the Text file data connection dialog box enter or browse to the RSS textile as saved by the Dise RSS Reader application. You will see a preview of the text at the button of the dialog box. You can optionally set other parameters that controls any date stamp or processing of the text file that you want to do. Press OK to get back to the Dise Composer Main Window
The final result - Live RSS feed in your presentations
There are many other ways of using RSS and tickers in Dise. You can create tickers that are always played stay on top of the other content and you can also create multiple tickers on the same scene with different feeds. You can also include multiple feeds into the same ticker to create a variety of news. You can even use effects and movement on your ticker object.
And the best thing of all is that you don't need to do any more work. Your presentation is always up to date!.
