Low-Cost Tiled Display System Architecture with Dynamic Web-Based Management

Abstract

[EN] In this paper, a scalable hardware and software architecture for tiled display systems (a.k.a. videowalls), which can be implemented by using low-cost devices, together with a dynamic web-based management and configuration service are proposed. It has been designed to support both stored and live broadcast/broadband content, in mosaic or warp distributions. The displays and devices can be dynamically configured via web in different ways: the displays can create a single display of a larger size; or they can be configured in a customized way in order to play-out different media contents in different display combinations. As display renderers, low-cost devices are proposed as the main hardware element to obtain affordable videowall systems. As a proof of concept, two prototypes have been implemented, including an accurate synchronization mechanism based on a Master/Slave control scheme and aggressive and smooth playout adjustment techniques. To evidence the good performance of the prototypes and configuration service, both objective and subjective evaluations have been conducted regarding synchronization accuracy and usability. On the one hand, the mean values of the asynchronies between the video playout processes in each display are kept below 25ms (i.e., frame accuracy). On the other hand, the obtained usability score in the System Usability Scale (SUS) test has been 88.65, which is considered as excellent.