Video wall

“What’s innovative about a video wall?” I hear you cry. “We’ve all seen them. Big…walls of video. Been done for years.” We’ve said many times that the single most innovative thing about the Raspberry Pi is its price. $25 or $35 gets you something that would have cost you four or five times that amount before the Pi arrived on the market. This means that you can save large sums of money in some applications, especially in applications where you need to buy a lot of separate devices. A video wall requires one device per screen, and another to drive them all together. I’ve seen video wall solutions being run with all kinds of devices at the back end; previously one of the cheapest ways to do this was to buy a Playstation for each of your screens – obviously a much more expensive (and power-hungry – you’re spinning a lot of hard drives all day to get the result you want) way to get what you’re after. Plus, of course, our HD video capability’s really great. So Alex Goodyear at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy has put together a really elegant video wall, supported by a group of Raspberry Pis. Energy consumption and cost are both reduced enormously, making video walls like this much more accessible to enterprises which don’t have huge funds, like museums, schools, shops, galleries and offices. You can use different sizes and orientations of screen in the same set-up here; you can use the screens to show one large moving image or many small ones; you can display static content like photos or web pages alongside moving content on the same wall. Read more about what Alex has come up with at CCFE – we’re looking forward to seeing more of these in the wild!

URL: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3648