What is a Video Wall?A video wall is a special multi-screens setup that consists of multiple computer monitors or television set tiled together contiguously in order to form one unified large screen. The TV wall, display wall, data wall, and media wall will be referred to as a Video Wall.
Typically, multiple display devices including LCA panels, LED panels or rear projection cubes are tiled together in a matrix to create a single logical screen, on which any large electronic display of a video image or images can be displayed in a presentation format.
Why is a video wall required?
The video wall and Kvm extenders has several advantages and attributes, such as high-definition display, consistent brightness, more video image quantities, mixed source resolutions and formats, flexibility of customizing presentations and the centralized displaying/control that single displays cannot achieve otherwise.
Reasons for using a video wall instead of a single large screen include the ability to customize tile layouts, greater screen area per unit cost, and greater pixel density per unit cost due to the economics of manufacturing single screens which are unusual in shape, size or resolution.
Single Video Wall Controllers
When using a stand-alone video wall, without a complex network infrastructure, single video wall controller is best use and applications range for small walls to large walls with up to 64 displays in total. This type of controllers is common for video walls which operate stand-alone and are not part of a large network, for example in corporate lobbies or in simple digital signage applications.
Network-centric multi-screen video wall controller
When the video wall is integrated in a large networked visualization infrastructure, and should be able to display images coming from many different sources located in many different places around the world, these are the controllers you need.
The concept of networked visualization is very easy to understand. Simply connect a source (a road camera, a sensor, a computer etc.) to the suited encoder to get the video, images or data into the secure IP-based system. The standard internet infrastructure will transport this information wherever you want, all over the world. Service nodes can be added to the network for additional processing.
Such a networked system is essential in critical decision-making environments. All stakeholders need to collaborate in the most efficient way possible. This includes sharing information between the control room, the breakout rooms, and to field workers. The control room often operates as a central intelligence hub, where all information is gathered, processed and distributed.
3D video wall controllers
For more complex content, including 3D images, or when needing more artistic freedom to position the content (for example to display picture-in-picture windows), you need all the image processing power you can get. These are well-known for use in complex projector setups, are also perfect to drive video wall. This is especially interesting for applications that need to create a wow effect like in experience centers or large corporate lobbies. The freedom to create spectacular layouts, when needed even in real-time, lifts the video wall experience to a completely new level.
For example KVM tec India standards provides a standard network Kvm switch and video wall controllers can be used for switching systems and enables super-fast switching.
Hardware-based video wall controller
The hardware-based video wall controllers are appliance-based processors and built on a proprietary FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) hardware platform, designed with a dedicated processor, high speed cross-point video bus, and a customized and embedded operating system.
The advantage of using a hardware-based video wall controller is high performance and reliability. With high-speed cross-point structure, the hardware-based controller has up to 50Gbps dedicated and independent input/output channel bandwidth, which contributes to the high-speed video processing and switching with very low latency.
Software-based Video Wall Controller
These types of controllers use standard or industrial PCs, instead of proprietary hardware. A software based PC & video-card controller is a computer running an operating system (i.e. Windows, Linux, Mac) in a PC or server equipped with special multiple-output graphic cards and optionally with video capture input cards.
These video wall controllers are often built on industrial-grade chassis due to the reliability requirements of control rooms and situational centers. With Microsoft Windows system, the PC-based video wall controllers always need programing, installation of software on both client and server sides, inherently contains windows virus risks, blue screen errors, system breakdowns and other vulnerabilities. It is normally used for small scale video walls.
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