Lyrebird

Lyrebird is an advanced software application whose purpose is to help you publish data to different devices. The tool gives you the freedom to design, edit, and distribute media content to a wide range of devices using LCD or projection mode.

It comes packed with two modules, an Editor and Player. They both work hand-in-hand for streaming data on devices. The Player can be deployed on host computers in the LAN. The device can be connected through video port or serial port. You may control all devices via the Editor.

The layout of the Editor looks a bit overwhelming at a first glance but this only because the utility has a lot of features to offer so be prepared to spare some of your time to understand how it works. A help manual is embedded in the package.

Lyrebird offers you the possibility to split the screen into several parts. You may organize the windows using drag-and-drop actions and stream a different content into each panel.

The tool lets you import videos (e.g. AVI, MP4, MOV), images (e.g. JPEG, BMP, GIF), text files (e.g. TXT, RTF, DOC), Excel items (XLS, XLSX), PowerPoint presentations (PPT, PPS), and database files (MDB, ACCDB).

What’s more, you are allowed to insert clock, timer, link, temperature sensor, or a custom program. There are all sorts of customization options that can be applied to the multimedia content. For example, you can add image effects, alter the color and size of the text, and display an overlay text on videos.

Lyrebird comes packed with a built-in scheduler that helps you publish the content for a certain number of times, on a specific date, every day, week or month, or between a custom time interval.

You can adjust the volume, configure the brightness, play or stop the current presentation, generate statistics for certain devices and export the information to CSV file format, and perform LCD screen tests in order to detect bad pixels.

In conclusion, Lyrebird impresses with its comprehensive feature package which is meant to distribute media files to all sorts of display devices. Although it may take some time to discover all of its features, the final results are all worthy of your effort.

NOTE: The current version lets you use the Editor with a single Player on one computer. For more features, you can purchase the Network Edition or Advanced Network Edition available on the developer's website.