The Playback Machine (Score 1)

There's a system out there that does exactly what you're looking for. It's called the Playback Machine. I currently use it to power the television station for BayCon, which is a science fiction convention in San Jose, California. It's available from CPAN, here: http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/S/ST/STEPHE N/Video-PlaybackMachine-0.03.tar.gz

Here's how it works. You enter your schedule using a web-based front end, picking from a list of movies from a database. Whenever it's time to play a movie, the PM will play it. Whenever it isn't time, PM will play music while showing picture slides, announcements, and "up next"s. You can change the schedule while the system is running. The database backend makes it impossible to inadvertantly schedule two overlapping entries.

The main issue with it is that it's rather difficult to set up. Since I'm the primary developer and primary user, there's been little work on making it easy to install for other people. However, if others are interested in using this system, I would love to work with them. Please send me a private message if you're interested.

Another system which does the same thing is VideoKeg, which is written up here: http://ian.blenke.com/projects/videojukebox/perl/t k/mplayer/xfree86/epia/touchscreen/whitepaper/Vide oKeg.html.