Digital sign boards

Dashrender

My office wanted to setup a digital sign board.

With Scott's help we found Thanks For Holding, a vendor that makes Music on Hold and digital sign videos at a very reasonable price.

With the content handled I needed a way to display the video in our office. Of course the vendor want to push us toward some pricey player and professional display for $1000's or more, but for now we are trying a much less expensive solution, basically to dip our toe in.

I found Pisignage.com They have an image($25 one time fee) that runs on R-Pi's that will pull from either their hosted solution (which requires a subscription - $20/yr per player) or you can download the open source server and host it yourself.
Even better, they give you two players/hosting licenses free (currently claim forever free).

I'm sure I spent way more than I needed to on a R-Pi 4, but it's what I could find in stock easily. Assembled the kit, downloaded the imz file, burned it to the flash card, booted. it came right up, I had to join it to the WIFI, then add it to my pisignage account. Adding the WiFi account is a bit of a pain, you have to spell the SSID cap sensitive, it won't search for available SSIDs.

Once it was added, I was able to upload content to the service, add it to the default group, which the new player was already a member of, then tell it to deploy. All in all, probably took less than an hour from the time I opened the R-Pi box to a video playing on my TV.

The solution has the ability to turn off the TV if the TV supports CEC, mine claims to, and I have set a schedule, but haven't passed the schedule threshold yet.

The first set of sample videos I uploaded seemed to work fine - then I made some changes, pushed some new videos out... and when I was watching the player play, I noticed the sound was super choppy. it eventually cleared up - I can only assume at this point that the upload taxed the system to the point it couldn't smoothly play the video and audio (the video seemed flawless by the way).

The transitions between uploaded videos goes to a black screen for about 1/2 second. I'm not a huge fan of that transition, so I had to order my video from the above vendor as a single file instead of each individual component (which would have allowed me to mix and match as I wanted).

I'll report more after a few more days of playing with it.

JaredBusch

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

My office wanted to setup a digital sign board.

I built a RPi for a tradeshow display.

It only had one video that was to play on a loop so.

I used a standard Pi install, copied the file to the system, then created a script to launch it in VLC or whatever media player in full screen mode on endless loop and set the script to start on boot.

JaredBusch

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

I had to join it to the domain

Why the fuck would you do that?

Pete.S

Real signage displays have embedded media players and remote management.
Problem solved.

They are also designed for 16/24 or continuous operation.

DustinB3403

@jaredbusch said in Digital sign boards:

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

I had to join it to the domain

Why the fuck would you do that?

Yeah... This makes no sense. Also screenly.io/ose

scottalanmiller

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

Adding the WiFi account is a bit of a pain, you have to spell the SSID cap sensitive, it won't search for available SSIDs

My RP does. Must be the PiSignage image.

Dashrender

@jaredbusch said in Digital sign boards:

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

I had to join it to the domain

Why the fuck would you do that?

WoW - that was totally the wrong word.

I joined it to WiFi.

Dashrender

@pete-s said in Digital sign boards:

Real signage displays have embedded media players and remote management.
Problem solved.

They are also designed for 16/24 or continuous operation.

Considering the cost of those displays and the fact that we've had 3 standard off the shelf TVs running constantly for 5 years with no issues, I think I'll save some money.

If - If this becomes a problem... we'll invest in better tools.

scottalanmiller

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

@jaredbusch said in Digital sign boards:

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

I had to join it to the domain

Why the fuck would you do that?

WoW - that was totally the wrong word.

I joined it to WiFi.

OOOHHHHHH

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said in Digital sign boards:

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

Adding the WiFi account is a bit of a pain, you have to spell the SSID cap sensitive, it won't search for available SSIDs

My RP does. Must be the PiSignage image.

probably is.

scottalanmiller

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

@scottalanmiller said in Digital sign boards:

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

Adding the WiFi account is a bit of a pain, you have to spell the SSID cap sensitive, it won't search for available SSIDs

My RP does. Must be the PiSignage image.

probably is.

I have four RPs here!

scottalanmiller

We run the hotel on RPs. I should look at digital signage here! But the salt water is brutal.

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said in Digital sign boards:

We run the hotel on RPs. I should look at digital signage here! But the salt water is brutal.

now there is a case to spend the good money on better/best equipment.

scottalanmiller

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

@scottalanmiller said in Digital sign boards:

We run the hotel on RPs. I should look at digital signage here! But the salt water is brutal.

now there is a case to spend the good money on better/best equipment.

But no warranty support here, so cheap might make sense.

Pete.S

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

@pete-s said in Digital sign boards:

Real signage displays have embedded media players and remote management.
Problem solved.

They are also designed for 16/24 or continuous operation.

Considering the cost of those displays and the fact that we've had 3 standard off the shelf TVs running constantly for 5 years with no issues, I think I'll save some money.

If - If this becomes a problem... we'll invest in better tools.

You only think you saved money. You looked at the initial cost but forgot to account for all the other costs.

A signage display is only a couple of hundred bucks more than a similar TV from the same brand. For that money you have to spend of lot of hours researching, installing and configuring before you end up in the exact same spot with a comparable solution. You also need to buy and install an RPI/PC and software for that. But the hardware you have cobbled together is still inferior to the real thing.

If you're doing it because it's fun then that's one thing, but from a business perspective my guess is that your solution is way more expensive for the business in the long run. Especially when you quit your job and the next guy have no idea how it works.

scottalanmiller

@pete-s said in Digital sign boards:

@dashrender said in Digital sign boards:

@pete-s said in Digital sign boards:

Real signage displays have embedded media players and remote management.
Problem solved.

They are also designed for 16/24 or continuous operation.

Considering the cost of those displays and the fact that we've had 3 standard off the shelf TVs running constantly for 5 years with no issues, I think I'll save some money.

If - If this becomes a problem... we'll invest in better tools.

You only think you saved money. You looked at the initial cost but forgot to account for all the other costs.

A signage display is only a couple of hundred bucks more than a similar TV from the same brand. For that money you have to spend of lot of hours researching, installing and configuring before you end up in the exact same spot with a comparable solution. You also need to buy and install an RPI/PC and software for that. But the hardware you have cobbled together is still inferior to the real thing.

If you're doing it because it's fun then that's one thing, but from a business perspective my guess is that your solution is way more expensive for the business in the long run.

In many cases, I'd agree. But in this case, I'd think that researching and setting up an RP to do signage would be as fast or faster than researching a signage company. And having no background in it, the signage vendors would have you at their mercy with you having no idea who is good or bad.

If you were going to make a career of it, sure. But I bed I can set up and do an RP based sign faster and cheaper long term, even if I had to pay the same for the hardware, just because it would take so much less work.

Now it depends on what you want the sign to do, of course. But I have customers doing it on RP and Chromeboxes and it is hard to imagine how a signage vendor could compete. Even discussing it would take almost as much effort as the final product.

And where do you even start to research signage brands, features, support, history, etc.? And what signage vendor has the support infrastructure of RP?