The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
1–10 of 64 posts
Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
#2Congrats on delivering this fun project! I do a lot of work with synchronizing media content across devices so it’s always fun to see the solutions people come up with. You probably came across them in your research, but the industry standard way of creating a synced video wall like this is with BrightSign media players. The total cost for purchasing them and the screens would for 20 displays could easily end up in the 10s of thousands, so big kudos to you guys for finding a way to make this work with recycled devices.
If you are ever interested in working on some mediasync-related codebases hit me up! We hire devs to do freelance contracts fairly often.
Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
#3Congrats on delivering this fun project! I do a lot of work with synchronizing media content across devices so it’s always fun to see the solutions people come up with. You probably came across them in your research, but the industry standard way of creating a synced video wall like this is with BrightSign media players. The total cost for purchasing them and the screens would for 20 displays could easily end up in t…
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.
Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
#4Excellent work, and a great read.
What videos did you end up playing on this after your testing was complete? Do you have any recordings to share of this in action?
Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
#5That's an insane amount of work. Enjoy having free time while it lasts...
Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
#6I 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
Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
#7Excellent work, and a great read. What videos did you end up playing on this after your testing was complete? Do you have any recordings to share of this in action?
Thank you! We haven’t figured out what to play on it yet actually - I think the plan is to build out all the tools so that our school can create and upload their own videos (eg. montages of students work - this is in the Design workshop after all) to display on the screen. It could be self-service even after we graduate in June.
Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
#8Congrats on delivering this fun project! I do a lot of work with synchronizing media content across devices so it’s always fun to see the solutions people come up with. You probably came across them in your research, but the industry standard way of creating a synced video wall like this is with BrightSign media players. The total cost for purchasing them and the screens would for 20 displays could easily end up in t…
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 $/minute, the amount you pay ends up being vanishingly small IMO.
Your main “cheap” alternative to a BrightSign is a Raspberry Pi, which is definitely cheaper, but has its own host of issues to deal with.
Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
#9I worked at Google when Chromebook shipped. They put out a call for decorations for the lobby and I proposed something similar to this but they said "no" :( Maybe because I asked for 40-64 machines :P
I would not have tried to sync video though. Instead I'd have made time based animations and use the network the synchronize the clocks.
you can see an example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64TcBiqmVko
It's 8 machines running Chrome. The only thing synchronized are the settings and the time.
They machines do not have to be in a grid either. I was inspired by the Boston Science Museum's virtual aquarium
Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
#10I 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
At least computationally that would be much more expensive and might not work well with weak devices or power saving goals.