Return to Dust

At the begining of last year we decided to implement digital signage around our campus. We had a limited budget to work with so I decided to do what I love best.. experiment! As I began looking around I found that the “normal” way of doing things was just not going to be cheap. Being a programmer by heart, I decided there had to be a much easier, simple way.. so it was time to think outside the box (is it ever not that time?). I plan on doing several posts describing what our current solution consists of but for now, I’ll give a quick summary.

First of all, we planned on doing this in August of 09, however, we came across an incredible deal of 15 42″ plasma tvs from circuit city when they went out of business near the beginning of 09.. we bought them for an avg of $350 a piece as well as several other incredible deals. The TVs were ceiling mounted store signage displays so we got the cables, mounts (with 8 ft extentions!), and tvs for the same price! We used a few of the mounts for our open air installs but had to buy a few $20 mounts from monoprice.com (a great site for mounts and cables by the way) for our wall locations.

We also bought the store security system from one of the circuit city locations so in the process we aquired a good deal of coax. That got me to thinking about HD CCTV options.. a quick search revealed the standard option of encoding a single Clear QAM HD Cable channel for around $10k. Eventually I came across a new company called ZV. Long story short, at the time they had units called the ZV-100 that simply encoded 720p into a QAM channel.. made to be used in homes to connect your computer to a tv in the other room. After spending some time talking with their techs, we learned that the device had really stired up the market.. it had some flaws keeping it from going full commercial but they were preparing to release a commercial version for $2500. This was an amazing deal compared to $10k, but still didn’t quite fit the budget I had. I decided to experiment and found one of their original ZV-100 boxes on ebay for $250. A few days later, I bought a used Dell GX280 for $100 and suddeny I’m brocasting near real-time 720p across coax!

Now that I had the transmition protocol, I just needed a good way to manage content display. We toyed with various options everywhere from powerpoint, to quicktime loops, to some interesting commercial solutions (again, way out of budget!) and eventually came across XIBO (xibo.org.uk). XIBO didn’t do everything we wanted but it hit every major keypoint we were looking for.. low cost (can’t beat FREE!), open source, able to be customized. The developers were also very easy to contact and very helpful as we began to think ouside the box. I’ll go into more detail about how we use XIBO in a later post.

To sum it all up, we are currently using 2 computers (both $100 p4 2.8ghz Dells) running XIBO. Each computer runs through their own ZV-100 box (check ebay!) which encodes a 720p ClearQAM channel that I then send across coax directly to the TVs along with basic cable stations from Cox. We currently run 2 seperate channels and I’m about to deploy a 3rd. Each channel is a different xibo client so I schedule content and simply change the channel on each tv to the one I want. Adding new displays costs nothing but cheap coax and a TV now. Also, I have a HDHomeRun network tuner as well so occasionally I’ll use it as a wireless display for special occasions.

XIBO has been fun to play with.. I think that will probably be my next post unless somebody asks for something different.