Raspberry Pi for Digital Signage

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sfrasernz

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#248838 12-Apr-2019 07:37

I've been experimenting with 3 Raspberry Pis for digital signage. I want to play ripped DVDs, JPGs and PPT files from a central server across three TVs (retail application) over Wifi. Ideally these would be a in a play list and be controlled from a web interface (no keyboard or remotes for the Pi's). If I'm expecting too much from the Wifi (AC-Pro located about 30m from each of the Pis) then I'll need to run some cabling.

I've tried PiSignage and YoDeck but have found them to be unreliable when playing large video files and they want to download media to the devices themselves which isn't practical.

I'm about to try Kodi but wondered if there were any other thoughts on a good platform or other ways of achieving the above? Two of the TVs support DLNA so would this be a better choice?

BoerieGalore

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#2215478 12-Apr-2019 08:03

Dont see why it won't work with Kodi? I'm using a Pi 3 for a number of streaming applications and it works great. Its actually a powerful little board.

xpd

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#2215480 12-Apr-2019 08:05

Plex ?

XPD / Gavin

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SirHumphreyAppleby

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#2215489 12-Apr-2019 08:35

I set up something similar a few years ago using Google Chrome and Compute Sticks running Windows 10. I created a simple Web application in jQuery to pull JSON from a central server which provided instructions on what to play and in the case of video/images, the URL for the data. The browser does range requests from the Web server, so it doesn't attempt to copy the whole video to the host before playing.

In theory you can do exactly the same thing with the Pi. Unfortunately, at the time I was doing this, hardware acceleration support in browsers for *nix-based platforms running on the Pi was lacking (Linux support for the SoC in the Compute Sticks wasn't much better). There is a good chance if you did the same thing today, the Pi would be a viable solution.

Killerkiwi2005

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#2215520 12-Apr-2019 09:21

maybe https://www.screenly.io/ ?