What is a Video Wall Controller?

This article gives an introduction to the Video Wall Controller, elucidates the capabilities of the video wall control software, hardware architecture and configuration of the video wall controller.

To understand what is a video wall, click here or watch the below video, where they show the launch of a Rocket on a video wall.

Video wall on Youtube video

As you can see in the video, there is a huge display but it is not a single display. The huge display is actually a combination of multiple smaller cubes, each being an independent display unit (Actually a rear projection cube). A video wall can also be formed by combining multiple plasma display units or LCD/DLP display screens, but rear projection screens are used as the image gets perfectly integrated with the whole area without showing the borders of each cube.

The video wall is used to display large images (high resolution pictures, videos etc.) which are required to be viewed in a bigger screen for good clarity, mass visibility and to get more details. It is suitable for control rooms, research centres, network operation centres etc. where a large amount of data needs to be analysed and the inputs seen with each other or in a bigger screen with a great clarity.

Why is a Video Wall controller required?

As you can see in the video, initially multiple video’s are displayed – one in each cube, sometimes an additional source of input is also fed in between any of the displays for clarity and then after some time, all the displays (cubes) combine to show only the video of the rocket once it is launched, with an occasional insertion of secondary screens anywhere on the screen in a small window. All this is managed by a Video Wall Controller and the control software run by the video wall. So, basically the Video wall controller is required to decide which source is displayed on the individual cubes, whether they show different images or combine together to show one image, when and for how long to show images in a particular format etc.

Video Wall control software:

Video wall control software allows users to freely size and position live video, RGB and desktop sources anywhere on the tiled display wall. It will also allow users to decide the duration for showing a particular combination of images/videos/live streams on the video wall screen. There is generally a big desktop monitor available with video wall, that lets users to decide which input stream goes where and when. Windows of any size, can be displayed on the display wall. There is no limit to the up-scaling or down-scaling of such images as the video walls can display finger print size images to full screen images anywhere, seamlessly.

This process can be monitored and managed over a remote PC over the IP network, Live. There can also be specific text overlays in individual windows or in the full display. The inputs can be automatically cycled (after a specific duration) where one source is displayed in one cube for some time, and then another source gets displayed on it. All the inputs are connected to the video wall controller hardware appliance, which acts like a matrix switcher – accepting multiple inputs and displaying multiple outputs in any combination.

Video wall controller appliance:

A video wall controller basically consists of a main chassis with optional accommodation of multiple chassis. The main chassis consists of the control processing unit, hard disk bays (multiple), memory, DVR drive, USB connectivity etc. The hardware is mostly made of standard server components and has all the options you expect in a critical server for redundancy like hot swappable power supplies, redundant chassis fan, redundant ethernet adaptors, hot swappable hard disk with RAID level 1 to 5 etc.

There may be provision for multiple input/ output source connectivity in the main chassis but if more inputs need to be used, some models of the controllers support expansion through the expansion chassis. So, each expansion chassis has some free slots, and in each slot a PCI/PCI-X based card can be inserted that supports 4 analog inputs (composite video, S-Video), two RGB inputs, DVI inputs, streaming video input etc. based on the type of the card and the vendor. Per display output unit (cube) multiple input windows can be displayed (Like 16 input sources, etc. based on the model). Each controller supports the connectivity of multiple such display units (cubes) together (Like 64, 8, 16 etc) depending on the vendor and the model.

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