I'm not big on the technical side of things but I just wondered what would be the best way to control the content on 17 different screens from one computer? Would I need a computer per screen or is there an easy way of setting it up? The wiring is still to be done in the building so they just want to know how we want to do things.
Cheers for any advice 
wow sounds cool you prob need a splitter heres one for 16.. http://www.beachaudio.com/Startech-Com/St1216pro-p-80679.html
17 is kind of odd as this sort of stuff often scales in binary (32?) but I know nothing.
Thanks JLM? Would that be able to output different content to each screen or the same on each one? Each screen is outside a classroom and I need to be able to tell each screen separately what class and which students are in each room.
I think this solution maps one screen, so lots of windows, it seems very cheap ( almost to get one and try! )?
Matrox may have more expensive solutions http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/multi_display_software/
I don't know more than is on the tin? I researched dual cards when I was running 2 19" iiyama's and did a lot of reading around at the time. Try googles on splitters and other words they use, maybe a phone call or email to there sales?
Companies like matrox might have special systems not on there website.
other options might be controlling lots of pcs remotely I think software has been discussed.
I think the best way would be to do what I normally do and have a small PC per screen each running a Director application that pulls the data from a database on the control PC. I'm just not sure on the best setup for the control PC and what database. IIS on windows XP Pro would not be able to cope.
for 138 dollars I really think it might be worth a punt and seeing if you can hook it up to say 4 screens and work out how to do what you need, then you can prob afford to spec one high end mac tower with the best graphics card you can find, but that is only a best guess, networking 18 computers sounds way more complex, thats why I would consider the 138 a small research cost risk that might save you and client money, 16 apps might be heavy but you can do some testing?
the Snepo fella's should be able to point you in the right direction Suzy, you should shoot them an PM.
Don't have a lot of experience in this area but I can tell you that you are not able to run 17 channels of content from a singe machine. You simply do not have the CPU/GPU capacity to do so.
What you will need is a machine per content channel (and a splitter for each channel that broadcasts to more than one screen). This is assuming that not all 17 screens can display anything at a given time (in which case you would need 17 machines).
Plus, you'll need a controller machine.
My approach would be to make sure all machines host all content and content is only played from the local machines (save on network and bandwidth issues). They communicate to the controller machine using sockets so you can push instructions from the controller down to individual display machines. The display machines function as very simple/dumb display boxes and only contain logic for when the controller box is inaccessible.
You could look into embedded hardware though I suspect you won't save that much money (considering the potential for added issues) and may as well run with mac Minis.
Like I said, not my bag really. If I were in a different situation (and not surrounded by people smarter than myself) I would probably jut get in contact with someone like pivod.com and outsource the whole requirement.
outsource the whole requirement
very wise... if you find the right company.
Originally posted by: Arsis Don't have a lot of experience in this area but I can tell you that you are not able to run 17 channels of content from a singe machine. You simply do not have the CPU/GPU capacity to do so.
I think 4 is about the limit, unless you are doing some sort of 'jumbotron' trick where you're just spreading a single output over multiple screens. You need at least one video 'head' per monitor.
yah... I've seen systems running dual graphics cards with dual video output... beyond that and you're in specialist/custom hardware territory.
Cheers for all the advice guys. I definitely want to do it myself as I enjoy the challenge. Plus I am used to doing the same thing on a smaller scale. I've done 6 units before each with their own PC I just wondered if there was an easier way to how I normally do it for 17 screens min. I usually have a control PC but I need a proper server for this amount of PC's and I just can't decide what database, server and language to use to feed the info into Director.
:oof: The D word.
shivers
Good to hear that you're wanting to take on the build yourself. Nice challenge.
Let us know how you progress.
As for the language, DB etc. I'm probably not the best person to offer that kind of advice. I'm sure Stinky or Lith would have valuable opinions if they manage to stick thier noses into this thread
Cheers Arsis. Yeah Director 
I'm not a Flash wizard like you lot so gotta stick to what I know!
The database, server, and language choices really boil down to what you're the most comfortable with. For application databases and kiosks i tend to be a fan of sqlite because it's so simple and easily embeddable. On the other hand for something that lives on a server where it has to deal with heavy requests PostgreSQL is my fav.
Language-wise, just pick what works for you. Hell, Apache/PHP, IIS/ASP[.NET], Ruby, etc... or something hand rolled.
We use Lua and C for the custom back end on PathPoint.
Cheers StinkFist
I used SQLite on the last kiosk project I did but that was only one machine connecting to it.
Could it cope with 17 machines?
That depends more on your app and app server than the 17 machines. In all likelihood it'll be just fine, if you're doing a ton of concurrent reads and writes then you might want something more robust but I'd have a hard time seeing 17 screens doing that much writing, even if they were constantly sending requests.
Only the few touch screens on the system will be doing any writing and that will just be to tell the control PC what sections are being accessed and how often but the digital signage screens will not be writing anything and only reading data from the database every five minutes so I think I should be alright with SQLite then or I might use MySQL depending on how big the system could get which I'll find out in a meeting.
Cheers for the advice
Suzy, I've asked one of our tech guys to do a little bit of looking for us.
His first lead washttp://www.kramerelectronics.com/
Jeff came back with a rather large catalogue and had drilled down to these two part numbers: TP-210, TP-120
I'm not sure that is what you need, but it sure seems like the right company to ask... last bit of input from Jeff was that for our sense and purposes they are considered a "high-end" product line.
Ahh thank you Walt
Much appreciated!
