Projektil was asked to create a custom solution for a video wall system, including hardware and software.

After some research, the Raspberry Pi 3 appeared to be the right hardware for this.

One of the advantages using the Raspberry Pi are the cheap price, being able to play HD videos, having an ethernet port and support for the GStreamer open source multimedia framework.

Existing frameworks built for the Raspberry Pi have several disadvantages such as the inability to frame-accurately synchronize videos across devices. Most of the systems stream the content from one master to the other device, which is limited by the bandwidth of ethernet.
The GStreamer framework with its support for the Network Time Protocol (NTP) provides a solution to playback videos locally while synchronizing them with others. This allows to connect almost unlimited Raspberry Pis to the network while still being able to playback individual HD video files.

Further, we created a custom deployment system using Ansible to reduce the manual setup for each Raspberry Pi to a bare minimum.

For the CMS a web interface was created.
To controller and update the content and iPad was used.

Checkout the source code for the test setup here.

Credits:

Software Development: Patrick Fürst
Animation: Christian Indermaur
Hardware Production: Jonas Staub, Patrick Schwab
Production: Jonas Staub