I’ve received many emails from people asking if I know of a good media player for digital signage/dashboards/kiosks. I just found out about the Viewsonic NMP-500 and it looks like a winner — both in price and features.
The ViewSonic NMP-500 Network Media Player is IP-based with MPEG-1/2/4 video stream capability as well as supports HTML (webpage) with Flash 6 plug-in support and Flash 6 Standalone playback (I’m guessing latest Flash version support will be available when Linux players updates happen). The NMP-500 can handle muli-layers of high-quality graphics, text, and video which makes this device very powerful and versatile.
Check out the Manual for details on how easy it is to setup and use! The NMP-500 retails for $800.
On a side note: I hope to see these such devices supporting Microsoft’s WPF/Silverlight capabilites soon. Silverlight and WPF are very compelling technologies and are actually more powerful than Flash (and this is coming from a guy that has been using/building Flash applications for over 10 years).