Networked Media distribution for SME

[Boycie]

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

 

[Boycie]

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