Networked Media distribution for SME

Boycie

Boycie

Boycie

Associate
Joined
2 Jul 2004
Posts
1,820
Location
East Midlands
Hi Guys,

At work i've been tasked with speccing up a system to drive up to 10 displays dotted around our new office premises. The building has been cabled with CAT5E and the points where the displays are possibly going to be mounted have been fitted with 2 network ports and a power socket.

I'm thinking of going with HDMIoE and have some kind of rack mounted device in our comms room that can drive them. Does anyone have any recommendations or experience on this kind of setup? I've also had the idea of using Raspberry Pi's but then manageability might become an issue? Most of the displays will be showing dynamic web content (Dashboards) and also digital signage.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Thanks
B
 
I think you're right to highlight controllability as an issue. Domestic products such as Pi might work okay where someone has the time to be on hand constantly to babysit the system, but in the commercial world something more robust and fool-proof is often required before 'cheap' and 'does loads if...'

There are commercial digital signage systems available that allow proper control and also integration of external data sources. You should probably have a chat with one of the commercial install companies with experience in signage solutions. Try GV Multimedia (Midlands office) Watling Street, Claybrooke Parva, LE17 5BE; or Saville AV (Coventry office) Holbrook Lane, Coventry CV6 4BL

If nothing else it will give you a good insight in to the typical problems and solutions for operating and managing a digital signage/Point of Information system and a reasonable indication of what it costs to do the job to a professional level.
 
Exterity. But get ready to bend over.

Edit: Also decide if you want digital signage or media distribution. Signage is reasonably straightforward and low cost (at least compared to a few years ago - there are apps now which run on Chromeboxes for example), but real-time distribution of TV is what the Exterity guys are good at, and charge for appropriately.
 
Hi guys,

Thanks for the input. I have 1st hand knowledge of how temperamental RPi's are so I'm going to discount that straight away. Reason it was brought up was mainly because upper management saw the headline price tag and thought all the problems were solved.

Lucid, thanks for the company details I will take a look at them, the majority of the displays will be showing digital signage and we do have a lot of clients visit us so I am keen for it to be done properly.

Caged, interesting you mentioned Chromeboxes. I went out at lunch and bought a Chromecast to tinker with and for pretty much everything else other than the digital signage it seems to tick most of our boxes. The chrome browser casting works for our dashboards (they're all web based) and also for the "TV" in the office canteen. I spun up a VM on one of our old visualization servers and cast the live BBC News feed from the website to it in full screen mode. It has put some heavy load on the server but it was more just a proof of concept. This obviously won't scale very well at all on wifi if we have many screens streaming video so that will be something to note.

B
 
At the school i work at we have 7 digital signage screens. We were using Samsung magic info, but we are now moving over to Sedao. All you need is a normal screen and then you can either buy a sedao box which is preconfigured or you can buy a licence and installed it onto a windows machine.

It works pretty well and is one of the better ones we have looked at.
 
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