I'm setting up a 1080i plasma in my office reception area. The plan is to show commercials/clips on it all day long (part of our business is in the production area). I have recorded a significant amount of commercials via my EyeTV Hybrid (EyeTV 2.0). I am entirely a mac operation, but am open to a lot of options for a dedicated method of putting these commercials on the tv. The catch is - I'd like to have the commercials either individually or in small groups, then whatever plays it - ie a MacMini, Apple TV, DVD player, streamer, whatever - would be playing them in a loop or randomly. That way I don't have to combine all the files into one huge 8 hr file.

In the past I have been doing this with films using a cheap DiVX DVD player. I'd take my films or commercials and convert them to .avi format and burn them to a DL disc and choose "Play All" or "Random" or whatever my options were. This was a pain, as I was limited to the DVD-DL amount of files, and I had to change the disc often (and wasn't too thrilled with how they looked on my lcd, but that might have been my encoding settings)

Any ideas out there on the best way to accomplish this ? Most of my media is recorded off ATSC in 1080i or 720p, so I'd like to be playing them as close as possible to the original quality (since, the quality of the picture would likely say something about the quality of our company).

I'm not adverse to buying new hardware to dedicate to this. Right now we have about 15 machines being a combo of MacBooks, iMacs, MBPs, with a couple ATV's thrown in the mix.

One other thing - I have a ReadyNAS+ 1GB drive on my network, so maybe just connecting a streamer like the tvix M6500A would do the trick ? It seems like using 'shuffle' for video isn't often used, so I'm having a tough time finding posts with others using it for similar purposes.

Thanks for the ideas in advance.

Here is an idea that might work; encode your videos so that iTunes thinks they are music videos. Then make a playlist out of your "music videos" and shuffle the playlist in iTunes. Worth a try.

Basically, what you want to do is have a kiosk sort of setup. As BSteely says, get your content into iTunes, then organize it however on your Mac, and use an appleTV on the plasma for playback via ethernet, either stream or sync.

Which would work IF ATV or iTunes were able to shuffle video. As far as I know, they cannot. I bought a tvix 6500 and it plays all videos in a specific folder, one after another or shuffle, so that for now, although not perfect, is my solution.

If you are under "video" or "Tv Shows" in iTunes, you're right and it does not shuffle.
But If you create a playlist and drag the video files into it -> shuffle is active (as well as loop).