[Luke Redpath]

Hello there, I've got a bit of work (with possible future work) for some clever Flash/actionscripters out there:

THE BRIEF

I've been tasked with developing a prototype solution to a small piece of software that will enable us to display media (videos mainly) across multiple clients (individual Windows-based PCs) at the same time.

Most importantly, the videos playing on each machine must be time-synched (that is, they should always be playing the same thing at the same time). This should operate somewhat like a Windows screensaver in that it comes on when the PC is inactive and can be disabled by some activity - it doesn't *have* to be an actual screensaver application though.

Based on my initial investigation I've concluded that Flash with some Actionscripting will be a good approach for the client side (management and distribution of content will be handled as a separate project by myself). A little bit of clever programming should be able to solve the time-synching issue. We can not use streaming from a central server because this will use too much LAN bandwidth. Therefore the content must be played from the local machine.

WORK REQUIRED

At this stage, we only require a basic working prototype - given a folder full of media files (which can be converted to a suitable format), develop a client that:

* Plays the media files in order, synchronised across multiple machines
* Starts when the PC is inactive after a set period of time (should be able to change this through a simple config setting, an ini file or similar)
* Stops when there is mouse/keyboard activity.

Of course, the emphasis here is on good actionscripting rather than traditional Flash animation skills. Therefore I'll be evaluating anybody interested in this work as I would any other programmer. I'm looking for somebody with knowledge of good programming practices, particularly unit testing and version control.

I'd expect this only to be a couple of days work to begin with though this will probably lead to more work developing a more polished, final solution (and if all goes well we'll know who to come to when any future flash/actionscript work comes up!).

Please send your C.V. along with your daily/hourly rate to luke@coherent-media.com.

If you have any questions/suggestions/comments, please leave them on here!