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The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

varun.ch

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Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#11

Post by mikepurvis »

szvsw wrote: post #8
varun_ch wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I didn’t get the chance to mention them in the blog post, but yes we checked out the price tags on the commercial solutions :) It’s crazy! I’ve always wondered how much of the cost is hardware vs software… and I would imagine professional digital signage is also designed for reliability longevity and all that.

Reliability is a big part of it - but they are not really all that expensive for what you get IMO, especially in an enterprise context. A BrightSign is effectively a very sandboxed Linux box (you can SSH into them!) which has extremely reliable video and audio output, plus a huge amount of customizability, networking, scripting etc - plus various fleet provisioning/management software that goes with it. In terms of $…

Is the separate box thing because of commercial display realities? Certainly at trade shows and the like I mostly see people just plug a usb stick into the smart tv from wal-mart and play their sizzle reel off of that.

Is there some incentive to not just bake a small arm computer into each display?

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#12

Post by dividuum »

nashashmi wrote: post #6

I wonder if it would have been easier to make just one video and have the computer zoom in to different parts of the video. And then run the video simultaneously through a web browser

You very very likely won't be able to decode a 13660×768 video fast enough.

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#14

Post by szvsw »

mikepurvis wrote: post #11
szvsw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliability is a big part of it - but they are not really all that expensive for what you get IMO, especially in an enterprise context. A BrightSign is effectively a very sandboxed Linux box (you can SSH into them!) which has extremely reliable video and audio output, plus a huge amount of customizability, networking, scripting etc - plus various fleet provisioning/management software that goes with it. In terms of $…

Is the separate box thing because of commercial display realities? Certainly at trade shows and the like I mostly see people just plug a usb stick into the smart tv from wal-mart and play their sizzle reel off of that. Is there some incentive to not just bake a small arm computer into each display?

I entirely work with museums, where there are lots and lots of considerations in re: rendering device. The considerations for eg a commercial display are a little different, but I don’t have experience with working with those sorts of clients, so my answer is from the perspective of the media art context.

Having a separate box is just good separation of concerns - you can hook it up to whatever kind of projector you like (one projector might cost as much as $100k!), or you might need to use an analog display device (eg a CRT monitor) which certainly won’t have any USB/SD compatibility, in which case you will need some sort of hardware to convert signals appropriately. The separation of concerns just gives you much more flexibility.

Additionally, as mentioned before, you can network the boxes, which lets you do things like creating multi-channel synchronized video art installations.

Most BrightSigns also have GPIO pins on them, so I’ve even done things where I’ve synchronized kinetic art to the video playback.

You can write entire custom applications for your brightsigns (or plugins to the BrightAuthor configuration engine) - it’s just its own self contained platform, so there are a lot of benefits to having it be agnostic to the display.

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#16

Post by dividuum »

szvsw wrote: post #8
varun_ch wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I didn’t get the chance to mention them in the blog post, but yes we checked out the price tags on the commercial solutions :) It’s crazy! I’ve always wondered how much of the cost is hardware vs software… and I would imagine professional digital signage is also designed for reliability longevity and all that.

Reliability is a big part of it - but they are not really all that expensive for what you get IMO, especially in an enterprise context. A BrightSign is effectively a very sandboxed Linux box (you can SSH into them!) which has extremely reliable video and audio output, plus a huge amount of customizability, networking, scripting etc - plus various fleet provisioning/management software that goes with it. In terms of $…

I operate a digital signage company based around the Pi. Curious what problems you run into. SD cards?

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#19

Post by varun_ch »

bazzargh wrote: post #13

A similar thing from many years back: the junkyard jumbotron let you assemble a random collection of displays to display their portions of a much larger image https://github.com/mitmedialab/Junkyard-Jumbotron Video https://youtu.be/cAUtSVSTbzU?feature=shared

The Media Lab makes so much random fun stuff. I feel like it would be fun to remake this with modern web tech. (doing the alignment photo over email does sounds like fun too hehe)

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#20

Post by szvsw »

dividuum wrote: post #16
szvsw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliability is a big part of it - but they are not really all that expensive for what you get IMO, especially in an enterprise context. A BrightSign is effectively a very sandboxed Linux box (you can SSH into them!) which has extremely reliable video and audio output, plus a huge amount of customizability, networking, scripting etc - plus various fleet provisioning/management software that goes with it. In terms of $…

I operate a digital signage company based around the Pi. Curious what problems you run into. SD cards?

The deprecation of OMXPlayer has been problematic for one, since I rely on some custom applications which need to be able to have some fairly precise/low latency requirements between when you tell it to start playing vs when the playback actually starts, etc. I haven’t found a suitable mechanism which meets our reqs on a Pi for controlling/playing videos yet since that deprecation.

The lack of a regular HDMI output is mildly annoying but not really a problem. Audio configuration is sometimes problematic, usually not…

If a client wants to use their own Pis, getting them provisioned with our software isn’t always the easiest if the customer is techno-phobic (though that’s partly on us - RPi usage is relatively infrequent for our customers so we haven’t put the time/energy into docs and into baking an image etc).

I love Pi’s, but they just that extra bit more finicky than BrightSigns which are hyper optimized for our use case and prevalent in our customers’ equipment rooms already.

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