How to best display music videos on a wall

[sybariten]

We're gonna have a music café evening with just musiv videos, and i am trying to plan the technical part of the event.
We will be playing with a projector thats 5 years old or so.
Sound through professional PA speakers, powered.

I think we will be playing from a laptop, and if possible, i'll supply a astandalone DVD player as a backup.

Videos on an external USB harddrive, and perhaps player software there too.

I'm thinking mplayer, with or without a GUI, and i have a question on crossfading.
Is crossfading of videos when playing through normal desktop systems easily doable?

I'm thinking this might be a computational nightmare if the videos are of different size.

If not possible, is there some clever way to have mplayer do a 1 second fade up and fade down (to black) between each video?

Also, if some of the videos are in mpeg2-format they are gonna be interlaced. Is that probable to cause a problem with the setup i mention?

[Krispy Kritter]

I don't have any answers for you, but if you get all of the hardware together before hand (regardless of any answers you may get here) and do some testing, you will save yourself a lot of headaches.