Artificial Intelligence is pretty fun stuff, but the promises of it being a time saver aren’t always true. I typically use Microsoft’s Copilot and before that Bing’s version of ChatGPT (though I admit to owning a Rabbit R1, which is cute but not as useful as I’d hoped). I’ve asked Copilot for help with programming issues, and while it often provides helpful answers, sometimes it comes back with code examples that are hopelessly broken or way out of date.
I recently wrote a post on LinkedIn to talk about Hiperwall‘s commitment to supporting our customers and our success at doing so. I wrote the following two paragraphs:
From the start, Hiperwall saw the value of responsive and effective technical support. Whether it is a system configuration question, problems with a firewall, or PC issues, our Technical Services team will leap into action to help. I have invariably heard high praise for the responsiveness and thoroughness of our team from both customers and partners.
We have recently renamed and refocused our ongoing “maintenance” services as HiperCare to reflect our commitment to keeping your Hiperwall video wall working for you. If you are looking for a video wall product, know that you will be well-supported with Hiperwall. If you have a Hiperwall system, make sure your HiperCare is up-to-date so you get the best in support and the latest software features.
On a whim, I asked Copilot to make it more impactful, which resulted in:
From the very beginning, Hiperwall has recognized the critical importance of responsive and effective technical support. Whether it’s a system configuration query, firewall issue, or PC problem, our Technical Services team springs into action to assist. Customers and partners consistently praise our team’s responsiveness and thoroughness.
We have recently rebranded and enhanced our ongoing maintenance services as HiperCare, underscoring our dedication to keeping your Hiperwall video wall operating seamlessly. If you’re in the market for a video wall product, rest assured that Hiperwall offers unparalleled support. For existing Hiperwall users, ensure your HiperCare is current to receive top-tier support and the latest software features.
I liked what Copilot did, but it was a bit too “marketing speak” for me and didn’t sound like something I would write. Some of the words and phrases it came up with, while succinct and correct, were ones I would not use. Since my goal was to speak from the heart, that wouldn’t do. So I spent a while integrating some bits of the AI rewritten paragraphs with my own and ended up with the following. Much of the time was debating with my wife over “will leap into action” vs. “springs into action”. I ended up liking the latter for brevity and energy.
From the very beginning, Hiperwall has recognized the critical importance of responsive and effective technical support. Whether it’s a system configuration question, firewall issue, or PC glitch, our Technical Services team springs into action to assist. Customers and partners consistently praise our team’s responsiveness and thoroughness.
We have recently rebranded and enhanced our ongoing maintenance services as HiperCare, underscoring our dedication to keeping your Hiperwall video wall operating effectively. If you’re in the market for a video wall product, know that you will be well-supported with Hiperwall. For existing Hiperwall users, ensure your HiperCare is current to receive top-tier support and the latest software features.
In the end, AI did punch up the writing a bit, but it didn’t save me any time. In fact, it took more time to review and rewrite than I should have spent on it. In the end, my original text would have gotten the point across and probably wouldn’t have embarrassed me. I should have just used it. But playing with AI is fun!
Video walls come in various shapes and sizes for many different uses. From Control Rooms to Collaboration Rooms and from Education to Digital Signage, video walls show information at a large scale to convey important data and help solve problems or, in the case of digital signage, influence people. Small video walls can be driven by a single device, but also cannot display much information. Larger video walls need to be driven by multiple graphics pipelines in some sort of scalable architecture. This article explores how sources and other content are ingested and displayed in scalable video wall systems. While the concepts are general to the field, specific examples will use the Hiperwall scalable architecture and its video wall software components. Because of Hiperwall’s focus on Command and Control as well as many forms of Collaboration, the examples will be taken from those domains rather than Digital Signage, though Hiperwall is often used for large-scale Digital Signage video walls.
In this post, I will:
Define scalable video wall systems,
Explain the advantages of scalable video wall systems, including their reliability,
Explore the types of content and sources used in these systems,
And describe how sources are delivered to the scalable video wall.
Scalable Video Wall Systems Defined
A scalable video wall system means that multiple input channels and graphics pipelines drive content on the video wall displays and that their number and capability grow as the system grows or the display size increases. Whether the large video wall display is many LCD panels arranged together or a direct-view LED system consisting of many tiles driven by several LED controllers, multiple graphics pipelines are required to deliver content to the screens. Many video wall systems consist of more than one video wall connected to the system and sometimes even satellite displays distributed throughout the facility. The ability to handle many (hundreds, at least) sources of information and display them simultaneously on video walls comprised of tens or even hundreds of displays is a critical requirement for large scale video wall systems, and only scalable systems can meet it.
In the figure below, a scalable video wall system is driven by PCs running Hiperwall video wall software. The figure shows the video wall displays driven by a pair of “HiperView” computers that decode and draw the content on the screens, in this case LCDs, but LED controllers are just as applicable. Some people call these “players,” but that vastly understates their capability, so I will stick with “display computers” or HiperView computers. Several “HiperSource” input computers capture many kinds of source content for display on the video wall. Much more information about this approach will be explored in a later section of this article. Finally, several control points, including fault tolerant HiperController PCs and the powerful, easy-to-use HiperOperator PCs provide customers the ability to manipulate content in real-time and control the video wall system. All these components, each running on commodity PCs, are tied together by a powerful commercial-quality Ethernet network switch. Because all content in a Hiperwall system is “just data,” whether it be video streams, screen captures, or high-resolution web content, the full bisection bandwidth of a properly configured network switch is sufficient to deliver hundreds of content and source items to hundreds of displays or LED controllers.
Advantages of Scalable Video Wall Systems
Cost-effectiveness is one of the primary advantages of scalable video wall systems, for several reasons:
The system can be scaled to meet customer needs. This means the customer gets a system that does what they want without having to over-provision (and overpay for) a less-scalable video wall controller.
Linear costs – because a scalable system is designed to scale up and down, costs grow in a fairly linear way as the customer explores their needs. Adding displays, computers to drive them, and licenses add small and predictable marginal costs, with no need to expand to a different chassis or a totally different design, as with many non-scalable systems. Even the Ethernet switch can grow to fit the system’s needs with stacking and other approaches.
Scalable systems can expand as customer needs grow. If a customer needs to expand by adding another wall or satellite displays or new inputs, a scalable system can grow to accommodate the new requirements with only an incremental growth in cost.
Upgrades – scalable systems are comprised of commodity PCs, so it is easy to replace and upgrade individual PCs without having to replace the entire system. A newer PC may add more capacity or greater reliability, thus providing a cost-effective piecemeal upgrade path. This means never getting left behind as technology improves.
Reliability – by design, truly scalable video wall systems avoid bottlenecks that slow performance. This has the positive side effect that it also reduces single points of failure. Using multiple commodity components together can add fault tolerance and recover capability to help the system maintain reliability and content integrity.
Another significant advantage of scalable video wall systems over non-scalable ones is capability/capacity. By adding computing power and graphics processing as the system scales, this increases the capacity of the system to accept and display content. If a video wall display system is large enough to display hundreds of video streams or other content, then the processing power driving that display system needs to be up to the task. Scalable video wall designs like Hiperwall fit the bill because their capability grows as the system grows. Each new HiperView computer adds capacity to decode more streams and drive more pixels on the displays. Using HiperView Quantum, the playback of all that content is synchronized between all the computers and, more importantly, between the displays, so even the largest LED video wall will not show tearing between LED controller boundaries.
Content Types for Scalable Video Wall Systems
A previous Hiperwall article describes the many uses of control room video wall systems and the content types they show. I will not repeat all that information here, but in summary, we differentiate between two content types: stored and dynamic.
Stored content is pre-rendered content, including images, text, and video files. These content items are imported into the system so they can be shown on the video wall.
Dynamic content includes IP camera streams, whether direct or via a VMS like Milestone or Genetec, captured video content via HDMI capture cards for example, web pages, or display/application capture streams. This content is “live” and must be made available to the video wall system, ingested to make it compatible, and then displayed on the video wall.
Scalable video wall systems have exceptional advantages and some challenges with displaying content. The largest advantage is that each display computer (HiperView in the Hiperwall example) only needs to render the content that is visible on the pixel space (displays or LED controllers) it is driving. This is an extreme advantage over other video wall systems when many content items are present. Instead of rendering the tens or hundreds of video streams on the entire video wall, a single display computer may only need to render 4 or 8 or 16 and then display the result. This is a significant component of the scalability advantage. This also comes into play with extremely large imagery. Instead of having to decode and render every byte of a gigapixel image, a scalable display computer only needs to decode and render just what is visible in its pixel space. This allows Hiperwall systems to interactively show, move, and manipulate gigapixel images with ease.
A challenge scalable distributed video wall systems have is because content that is shared between the pixel space of two different display computers is rendered and drawn by both those computers. For many reasons ranging from how busy each computer is to out-of-sync vertical refresh timing, the appearance of tearing could occur at the boundary if one computer renders the content later than the other one. With LCD displays, this effect is typically not very visible, partially because the bezel separation makes it less obvious. On LED systems, it can be distracting, so Hiperwall’s HiperView Quantum technology uses software and hardware to synchronize content playback to prevent tearing.
Reliability of Scalable Video Wall Systems
Another recent Hiperwall article explores architectural approaches to take advantage of the distributed nature of Hiperwall to greatly enhance reliability of the video wall system. Summarizing, various levels of partitioning the system into multiple regions and then adding inexpensive redundancy greatly enhances system reliability and fault tolerance. Two HiperControllers means if one gets disconnected, the other takes over. Partitioning the video wall into segments and driving each with separate display computers (and LED controllers if an LED wall) means only a small portion of the video wall fails if something happens to that computer or its connection. Driving different inputs of the displays or LED controllers with hot standby computers means the video wall keeps running even in the face of a display computer failure. Even the network switch can be redundant. These and other techniques make reliability and content integrity of a Hiperwall system cost effective to engineer from the start.
Source Input and Display in Scalable Video Wall Systems
So far, we have seen how a scalable video wall system can be used to show lots of content, including live or dynamic content, but what is this dynamic content and how do we get it into the system? Dynamic content is not stored content, so it is being generated in real-time by something and needs to be shown with minimal delay to be relevant. Depending on the type of content, that delay can be measured in milliseconds or maybe a few seconds, but timeliness is a key constraint on dynamic content usage.
Source Types
to come from an external source, such content is often called a “source” which is the term used for the rest of this article.
If the video wall is in a security operations center (SOC), the most common source type is a surveillance camera feed. These feeds can come directly from IP cameras, or via a VMS system like Genetec or Milestone, or even a raw video feed digitized or converted by a video capture device. In the first two cases, the source likely arrives at any video wall system as a compressed stream such as H.264 and must be decompressed to use it. For the capture device case, unless the capture device does compression in hardware, the video will arrive as frames, requiring high memory throughput to manage and use.
Other types of control rooms often need the output from specialized applications like SCADA systems or other monitoring systems to be shown on the video wall. Since these applications run on a computer, a screen capture type of source can be used to capture the state of the application and show it on the video wall. In other cases, the output of the computer can be fed via HDMI or other video cable into a capture device for display on the video wall.
Many control rooms are seeing a rise in the use of web applications, including GIS systems, maps, social media and news feeds, and web-based dashboards that show the current status of a process or system, such as data center monitoring. Web sources are different because they have no predefined shape or frame rate. A social media feed may only update every few seconds or even minutes, while traffic maps may update even less frequently. Maps showing emergencies may need to update within a second of data coming in. Unlike video streams or HDMI captures, web sources may have very unusual aspect ratios, possibly being very tall or wide, or can be much higher resolution than any typical display. This means the video wall system must be able to display web sources at sizes and shapes that match the source material, or else the view will be distorted or unreadable.
While the topic here is “video” walls, audio often plays an important role. News and weather feeds, as well as camera streams, may have audio that can provide information in a crisis situation. Therefore, the video wall system needs mechanisms to play that audio, as required, and adjust the volume of each source or content item as well as the output volume of each display computer. Therefore, if a control room operator needs to hear the audio associated with a specific source on the wall, the operator can unmute the content and turn up the volume on the display computer so the room can hear the audio.
Source Ingestion for Display
Getting all these sources into a video wall system is an important component of the system design. Some of them, like IP camera feeds, are on the network, thus many of them can come into the system via a simple network cable. Others, like analog and digital video signals, require capture devices with ports to accept the signal and a connection to the rest of the video wall system so the video feed can be shown. Web page sources also arrive via the network but may require complicated rendering before they can be shown on the video wall. In all cases, some level of processing and data transfer is required to show live sources on a video wall. Designing a scalable approach to accept these sources is a significant part of specifying a scalable video wall system.
Hiperwall uses several different “HiperSource” applications running on commodity PCs to ingest or create source feeds to show on the video wall. Each of these applications connects to the HiperController to identify the available sources, including their resolution, encoding, and more, so they can be listed in the content list to be selected and displayed on the video wall. Each HiperSource application also provides periodic thumbnails for each of its connected sources, so system operators can preview what the source shows before putting it on the video wall. While this can be a computationally expensive operation, this preview feature is an essential component of Hiperwall’s powerful but friendly HiperController software UI. The latest HiperOperator content list can show multiple such source previews at once, all periodically updating, so the user knows exactly what they will see when the content is sent to the video wall.
HiperSource IP Streams is the application that handles incoming IP camera feeds (including ONVIF support), encoder box streams, and many other video streams. Each HiperSource IP Streams application can manage up to 75 streams on a single commodity computer, and multiple such IP Streams computers can work together, so a Hiperwall system supports hundreds of simultaneously available streams. And because of Hiperwall’s scalable design, those streams can all be shown at once, up to the limits of the hardware. This means even small Hiperwall systems can easily have hundreds of streams available and show tens or hundreds at once.
HiperSource Streamer and the new Streamer+ handle high resolution, high frame rate video captures and deliver them to the Hiperwall system. While Streamer and Streamer+ have different commodity hardware requirements, both can capture and send the screen of their PC at high frame rate to the video wall. Both can also use readily available capture cards to capture incoming video feeds to send to the system. They take advantage of hardware-based video compression to deliver high quality, low bandwidth source streams to the video wall. Multiple screen captures and video captures can be used simultaneously. Both also offer KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) control of the Streamer PC when capturing the screen, so operators on the HiperControllers or HiperOperators can interact with the PC.
HiperSource Browser is a powerful Chromium-based web browser that delivers web content to the Hiperwall system at very high resolution (over 200 million pixels) for extremely high-quality maps, dashboards, social media feeds, PDFs, and more. The application supports Hiperwall’s patented Multi-Active browser tabs, so a single Browser PC can deliver several high quality web pages to the system simultaneously. HiperSource Browser also supports KVM control so HiperController and HiperOperator users can interact with the web pages as needed.
HiperSource Sender is a cross-platform screen capture application. It captures all or part of a computer’s desktop and delivers it to the video wall. It can send multiple portions of the desktop at once, to allow a user to only share data that is needed. It uses CPU-based compression and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, even in Virtual Machines, so is perfect for SCADA applications, small dashboards, and proprietary applications. Sender supports KVM control, so HiperController and HiperOperator users can control the Sender PC, if needed.
The HiperSource IP Streams and Streamer(+) applications take advantage of network features only provided within the LAN, so they must be on the Hiperwall subnet and connected to the Hiperwall switch. HiperSource Browser and Sender, however, can deliver their feeds via TLS-encrypted and authenticated connections, thus they can be outside the LAN and even outside the country. This remote source mechanism of Sender and Browser enables a powerful HiperSource sharing capability called HiperCast. HiperCast allows multiple HiperSource Sender and Browser sources to be shared with several Hiperwall video wall systems around the world. This facilitates data sharing and a common operating picture for organizations distributed across geographic locations.
Scalability and Design for Reliability
Having multiple source applications running on a few separate PCs seems natural for scalability, but it can also enhance system reliability as well. For example, if a system needs 50 IP camera streams, a single HiperSource IP Streams computer can handle sending all 50 streams to the video wall, but if someone accidentally kicks the plug on that PC, all 50 streams disconnect. Using 2 HiperSource IP Streams PCs adds only a small incremental hardware cost and no additional Source license cost, yet if one fails, only the streams connected to it go offline. With one of the VMS plugins that work with the most popular VMS systems, it is quick and easy to transition those disconnected streams to the other IP Streams computer while the failed one is repaired. Such transfers can also be done via the HiperInterface web services-style control interface.
Similarly, HiperSource Streamer and Streamer+ work with multi-port capture cards, and Streamer+ is regularly used to stream 4 or 8 video captures from a single PC, but if that PC fails, those 8 streams go offline. Splitting the capture capacity between several Streamer+ PCs adds a little to the hardware cost but provides easier failure recovery and lessens the impact if something does fail, again with no additional source license cost.
The Hiperwall software also has some built-in features to help with source reliability. First, if a source disconnects unexpectedly, that event is logged. Also, the locations where instances of that source were visible on the video wall are remembered, so if the source reconnects, it will be automatically shown in the same places again. Another important reliability feature is HiperFailSafe content. This content type is useful if there is an extremely important content item that must be shown even with failures present. As an example, if the weather report is critically important to the operation of a control room, a stream of a weather channel can be shown via HiperSource IP Streams. But what if the cable goes out or the capture device fails? Well, a different feed of the channel through a different provider can be shown via Streamer. What if that fails too? A web page showing the weather can be shown via HiperSource Browser. HiperFailSafe content lets an operator define which sources or other content items are related along with their priority, so the video streams have higher priority than the web page version of the weather report. Then, the Hiperwall system shows the highest priority item in that list that is available, so if one fails, it will automatically switch to the next one. Of course, multiple HiperFailSafe content items can be defined and used simultaneously. So together, hardware redundancy and software features can greatly enhance video wall system reliability.
Security and Integrity Approaches
Security and Integrity are important constraints in many mission critical environments, particularly because Hiperwall uses software applications to capture source feeds and deliver them to the video wall. It may be that security constraints prevent certain sensitive source computers from connecting to the Hiperwall LAN, or perhaps the application being captured is sensitive and integrity requirements prevent other software from running with it. The easiest way to solve those problems is to use a capture card or an encoder box that simply captures the HDMI output of that PC so it can be turned into a source for the Hiperwall video wall. This provides complete separation of the sensitive PC and the Hiperwall system. Since Hiperwall software does not store captured source streams, no sensitive data can be retained by the system when the video wall is not in operation. This means the integrity of the source PC is maintained, the security of the data on the PC is not impacted, and yet its output can be shown on the video wall. The Hiperwall team and partners have white papers and other guidance for system security and integrity.
Robust Support
The Hiperwall software and system architecture is designed to be easy to install and manage, but properly specifying a system takes practice. Our closest partners have exactly that expertise and are able to help design and specify a scalable Hiperwall system to meet the needs of just about any customer. The Hiperwall Technical Services team is readily available to apply their experience to scalable Hiperwall system designs as well. It is important to us that our customers know they do not have to do things alone – they will have support in designing and specifying the system, installing and configuring the software, and maintaining and upgrading in the future.
The reason for the trip was because I needed to go to the InfoComm trade show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Hiperwall didn’t have a booth, but our partner Sharp NEC was there, and I had a meeting set up on Thursday. While at the show, I visited booths of other partners, potential partners, and LinkedIn colleagues. I also walked around the show to see all the great display technology being offered. LED is everywhere, for both inside and outside. Much of the LED systems shown were fairly large pitch, so more for signage than control rooms, but several of the higher end vendors, especially Sharp, had finer pitch LED systems that would make great control room video walls!
InfoComm was spread across several of the Convention Center’s halls. I started in the Central Hall, but eventually made my way to the West Hall, where the display vendors were. Because of construction, there was no indoor route between the two, and the temperature was over 100 degrees F. Shuttle buses were provided, which I took, but that mostly involved waiting followed by a short drive. By the midafternoon, my phone said I had walked for 5 miles, mostly on the trade show floor – it’s a big show!
Based on advice from a colleague, we stayed at the MGM Signature hotel, which was great! The room was excellent, and the view spectacular, as you can see below. It was also convenient to the monorail, which I took to the convention center for the show. The MGM Grand has a great Italian restaurant, Luchini, where we had fantastic food and great service. I was able to have gluten free pasta and it was delicious. This may be the only trip I can recall where I had lots of exercise and activity, yet still probably gained weight – we ate very well!
Many video walls show critical information to help maintain the safety of a community or the productivity of a manufacturing plant or to monitor the behavior of complex networks and systems. The data and video feeds on these video walls are essential to the success of their organizations.
So how do we make sure your video wall content is available when it is needed?
Hiperwall’s HiperFailSafe approach to keeping your system operational even if a controller fails is part of the solution. Hiperwall’s distributed architecture means a failure of a display computer only affects a portion of your video wall, and the rest keeps running normally.
These are great solutions, but we needed to address data and source reliability problems as well.
In most systems, if the video capture device sending an important stream to the video wall fails or if a PC sending a data feed or a browser showing a dashboard fails, that content disappears. Throwing more hardware and software at the problem works by providing redundant feeds, but it doesn’t make operations with them seamless.
We developed HiperFailSafe Content to make sure your important data or video content can be shown even in the face of source failures. As long as there is an alternate source available, HiperFailSafe Content will show it if the primary source is missing. It is easy to have an alternate PC send the mission critical dashboard to the video wall, then the original plus the alternate can be combined into a HiperFailSafe Content item with priority to define their order. If the item being shown disappears, the first available alternate is shown in the same place(s) on the video wall. No operator intervention is required, and the integrity of the content is maintained.
As another example, if a news feed is part of the information needed in a public safety control room, and that feed is from an HDMI capture device, an alternate can be a screen capture computer sending the web version of that or a different news feed. HiperFailSafe Content objects are not limited to just two items – you can have alternates to your alternates, and even finally a static image warning that all the sources have disconnected to make the system operators aware. If the original content feed reconnects, it will replace whatever alternate is being shown, again without operator intervention.
How much does this very helpful capability cost?
HiperFailSafe Content has been available to all Hiperwall customers since version 7.1 and is available for no additional cost. We feel the feature is so valuable and important to our customers that everyone with modern Hiperwall systems should be able to use it to make their system even more powerful and reliable.
Contact Hiperwall, your video wall reseller, or visit the Sharp NEC Display Solutions exhibit at ISE2024 in Barcelona Jan 30 to Feb 2.
This was originally a LinkedIn post but I put it here for people that don’t want to log in there.
Hiperwall video wall software powered almost all the displays in the Sharp/NEC Displays booth at ISE 2023 in Barcelona. The massive, beautiful booth showed off several of Sharp/NEC’s big, bright LED display systems, many sizes, shapes, and orientations of LCD displays, and a few powerful projectors driven by Hiperwall video wall software version 8.0.
The Sharp/NEC Displays team, led by Massimo Gaetano, integrated Hiperwall into the booth for several purposes. Hiperwall’s ability to deliver lots of many types of sources to many displays, accounting for resolution, scaling, and rotation, meant that Sharp/NEC could easily share videos, streams, data feeds, and other content to any of their displays. They could even show the same content on many displays or span display walls with lots of content. They also took great advantage of Hiperwall’s ability to store and load groups of content on different parts of various video walls and displays. This flexibility let them show content in one area of the booth, then replace it with different content when another customer wanted to see something different while not affecting what was showing elsewhere in the booth. Sharp/NEC also used the HiperInterface web services-style network interface to programmatically load content and recall content groups using ZigBee (wireless) buttons, QR codes near many of the exhibits, and even phone apps. These advanced control mechanisms worked with Hiperwall’s content and source handling ability to make the displays in the booth responsive and dynamic!
See the video below to see the Sharp/NEC Displays booth driven by Hiperwall in action.
The Hiperwall software development team had a busy and productive 2022 with an outstanding video wall software release, and we’re preparing amazing stuff for 2023. Each member of the team designed, built, integrated, or tested complex software components that form the Hiperwall distributed video wall software product. Each team member expanded their capabilities by learning new techniques and skills to do a great job making highly capable and reliable software.
The big version release of 2022 was Hiperwall video wall software version 8.0. This version includes new features strongly desired by our customers, including HiperZones, the new HiperSource Streamer+, a new component to drive the video wall called HiperView+, and an enhancement to make HiperCast connections easier and more powerful with HiperCast Pull. Each of these major new capabilities and all the smaller features that go along with them add value to the product and give our customers more power to show their content in the most productive way possible. Customers with maintenance agreements can upgrade to version 8 where most of these features are included with no extra charge. Our Premium customers automatically get the incredibly powerful HiperZones when the upgrade, which is yet another reason the Premium package is the best deal around.
HiperZones
The crown jewel of the Hiperwall version 8 release is HiperZones, which allows a customer to define virtual video walls on their physical video walls to make separate zones of control and responsibility that help maintain content integrity. Different users can be assigned to control each zone and they cannot interfere with content on other zones. This means a large LED video wall can be split into different zones monitoring different regions of the country, for example, or different business elements. Changes to content in each zone are isolated from the other zones, so critical content is never obscured by another user’s content.
HiperZones is very useful for customers with large video walls, especially seamless LED walls, but it is also perfect for customers with multiple video walls or satellite displays, so content from one does not impinge on any of the others. The technology behind HiperZones is impressive – when customers learn that zone boundaries do not have to be display boundaries but can be defined to be nearly anywhere, they are impressed. Hiperwall software’s ability to manage and display content keeps getting better and better, and HiperZones is a huge step above traditional video wall capabilities.
HiperView+
Until recently, Hiperwall systems have typically used one small form factor computer per display to provide scalable performance as the system grew. In high-end systems with multiple LED controllers, we use HiperView Quantum to drive several LED controllers per computer and synchronize each computer to get frame-by-frame accuracy on content playback. We recognized the need to drive multiple displays or LED controllers for smaller systems from a single PC, so we developed HiperView+. This software is based on the powerful HiperView Quantum technology that optimizes video performance on NVIDIA GPU-based display computers but applies it to smaller systems that do not need multiple display computer synchronization. HiperView+ provides top-notch performance with multiple display output and is compatible with NVIDIA Mosaic technology to layout the displays.
Streamer+
The original HiperSource Streamer software is powerful and easy to use but is based on a Windows technology infrastructure that has not kept up with 4K video performance. The development team reimagined the Streamer concept and created Streamer+ based on new API standards that glean significant performance from the same hardware and take advantage of newer GPU hardware. It also uses a new more secure and more capable interface to the HiperController to allow for future enhancements. This new Streamer+ turned out to be a huge benefit for our customers and integrators during the pandemic supply chain constraints, because it allowed more and better streams from a single source PC, thus reducing cost and required hardware.
HiperCast Pull
HiperCast is a powerful capability to securely share source content between Hiperwall systems across town or across the world, but it was tricky for sysadmins to configure because of port forwarding and more. The software team developed a pull-based solution where each HiperController connects to the HiperCast server and subscribes only to needed sources. This new approach makes configuration of each Hiperwall system trivial yet adds significant power over content choice. HiperCast Pull increases the available audience for HiperCast’s sharing capabilities.
What’s next?
The Hiperwall software development team has not slowed down since the release of version 8.0. We have been working towards an exciting and powerful new release that builds upon HiperZones and the other great version 8 features. Beyond that, 2023 will see even more terrific new features and products added to the Hiperwall video wall software and beyond. We hope everyone who reads this has a terrific 2023 and we look forward to shaping the future with you.
Hiperwall video wall software has always been great at accepting and displaying lots of sources of several types, but sources and their uses have changed over the years as what they were showing evolved. This post contains my experiences with the changing landscape of sources used in Hiperwall video wall systems around the world, particularly for control rooms and similar, rather than signage applications.
Early days
Our first source type was the Sender, followed closely by the Streamer. These standalone apps send data to the video wall computers in very different ways making their uses unique.
Sender
The Sender software (now called HiperSource Sender) captures the screen or part of the screen of the computer it runs on and sends that to the Hiperwall system. Sender can run without even being installed on the computer (for environments that restrict software installation). The encoding of the Sender’s video stream is completely CPU-based, so it runs on nearly any PC, Mac, or Linux box, and the performance scales with the CPU and network speed. Sender can send its data directly to the video wall if it is on the LAN or can use the HiperController as an intermediate via an encrypted channel. This allows Sender sources to come from anywhere on the Internet. We extended this capability with a product now called HiperCast (was Share) that can deliver multiple Sender sources to multiple Hiperwall systems around the world.
Our clients use Sender for monitoring dashboards, social media feeds, desktop sharing, and more. Sender provides multiple captures on a single machine, runs in VMs, and supports KVM control of the source machine. The flexibility and utility of Sender means customers want to use it in many situations where high frame rate is not required. Sender also scales and resizes handily, so if a user changes the resolution or orientation of the screen of a Sender PC, it can adjust automatically.
While Sender is our oldest source type, it has undergone many performance and capability improvements over the years and remains the simplest and perhaps most flexible of our sources. Sender was built at a time when most of our customers were running custom applications to monitor and control their systems, so it was perfect for delivering those output screens to the video wall. Since the nature of such applications has changed to be more web-based, other solutions, especially HiperSource Browser, discussed later, grew in popularity.
Streamer
The HiperSource Streamer software is designed to deliver high frame rate, high quality video streams to the Hiperwall video wall. It uses hardware accelerated video capture, compression, and encoding to send a bandwidth-efficient video stream. Streamer uses our patented approach to synchronize playback on different display computers to make the frames sync across display boundaries for a seamless experience even if the video spans multiple display tiles. Streamer provides display capture, like Sender, but also supports capture cards, so it can stream video content captured from HDMI, SDI, or analog video sources to the wall. For display capture, Streamer also supports KVM control of the Streamer PC, which means content and applications on that PC can be interacted with while being shown on the video wall. Because Streamer requires hardware support to encode the stream, it must run on a moderately powerful PC on the Hiperwall LAN.
Since Streamer is great for high frame rate video streams, our customers use it to play videos, show presentations that have artistic transitions, share VMS consoles or other applications where high frame rate matters, and to show TV stations to monitor news and weather. Streamer has evolved over the years to support more hardware types and to manage capture cards in a flexible manner. Streamer continues as the go-to source type for video-style streaming.
Streamer+
With version 8 or the Hiperwall video wall software, we added a complete re-imagining of the Streamer idea in a product caller Streamer+. This new product was built from the ground up for performance, allowing more streams, more desktop captures, more capture card inputs, and higher resolution and frame rate than the original Streamer on supported hardware. The new Streamer+ has been the go-to choice for new installations and even upgrade customers since it was released.
Streaming Evolution
While Sender and Streamer are well suited to sending desktops and captured streams to the Hiperwall, our customers also wanted to send networked video streams from IP Cameras, video encoder boxes, and VMS gateways to their Hiperwall video walls. Since we already had a powerful synchronized streaming protocol from the Streamer, we adapted that to make HiperSource IP Streams. The IP Streams source software can ingest many types of network streams from ONVIF cameras, RTSP encoders, RTP and HTTP sources, and more. It then wraps the streams with our patented approach to synchronize playback across the multiple displays of the Hiperwall video wall and delivers the streams to the display computers. Because the IP Streams software is so efficient, a single moderate PC can ingest and process around 75 streams for simultaneous delivery and playback on a Hiperwall system.
With the addition of HiperSource IP Streams, and to provide more flexibility to our customers, we combined all the source license types into a single HiperSource license type. Therefore, customers could easily switch sources as their needs changed and no further license updates were needed. This simple source interchangeability has worked very well for our customers who may not know exactly what they want to use when they are defining their system. Now they can pick and choose and change as needed.
IP Streams has become a significantly popular source type for many of our clients’ applications. Some need to display streams from IP cameras, possibly via a VMS gateway, such as those provided by Milestone and Genetec. Some customers in secure or otherwise restricted environments use video encoder boxes to take the HDMI output of a computer and convert it to an RTSP stream that the IP Streams software delivers to the Hiperwall. Thus, their secure, mission-critical computers never have to be on the same network as the Hiperwall system, and the only interface to the Hiperwall network is a video cable. IP Streams also delivers content from TV decoder boxes, now that MPEG 2 streams are supported.
Large scale revolution
While Sender and Streamer have been able to capture web pages and send them to the video wall from the start, we wanted to take web content to the next level, so we developed HiperSource Browser. It is a real web browser, based on the Chromium engine, so it supports current web technologies, but it scales in amazing ways. Like most web browsers, it supports tabs with different content (web pages or PDFs, etc.), but each tab is actively rendered and sent to the Hiperwall video wall simultaneously. This means one PC can deliver several web page sources at once while the user does something else entirely. HiperSource Browser also scales in size, allowing a single web page capture to be huge. A control room customer with an enormous video wall uses HiperSource Browser to send several dashboards with 10s of millions of pixels each to their giant Hiperwall. That isn’t a typo – tens of millions pixels worth of custom dashboard data each! Other customers use Browser for normal-size web content.
Because the world has migrated from custom applications to web-based application and dashboards, HiperSource Browser has an incredibly bright future as more and more customers switch over to modern infrastructure. Its flexibility to send multiple content items of differing, possibly enormous, size makes it strongly in demand. And because it works in virtual machine environments and doesn’t interfere with other uses of the PC, it is very friendly to the staff and operators that use Hiperwall video walls. Browser is built on the Sender protocol, so it can send across the Internet via an encrypted channel and HiperCast can deliver Browser streams to multiple Hiperwall systems at once.
The future
The current broad range of sources described here support our customers’ current use cases, but technology is always changing. Performance and feature improvements are obvious next steps, but we are always examining new use cases and customer needs. New streaming protocols are becoming popular for both audio and video, so we are watching market acceptance of those. Integration with collaboration or other products could also be in the cards as the world recovers from disruptions over the last years. We have great sources to get your content to your Hiperwall video wall system, but we’re far from done.
I made this comment on LinkedIn about how awesome HiperZones are, so thought I’d share it here too. HiperZones is a new capability added to Hiperwall video wall software Version 8.0.
It is hard to explain how liberating the user/operator experience is with HiperZones, but I’ll try. HiperZones allows you to create essentially virtual video walls within your larger video wall. Just as virtual memory on your computer protects your application’s memory space, lets your program act as if it has the machine to itself, and prevents it from accessing memory it shouldn’t, HiperZones does much the same thing. When controlling content in a zone, the operator’s actions don’t affect content in other zones, so the operator can clear their content, add content, or move it anywhere without having to worry about covering up or removing critical content in other zones. It is a powerful feeling knowing you can control your zone without breaking anything for other users. HiperZones is by far my favorite feature of Version 8 of the Hiperwall video wall software.
With the recent release of Hiperwall video wall software version 8.0, “content integrity” is foremost on our minds so I wrote a blog post explaining it and our features to help achieve it.
With the challenges of the global pandemic, the team mostly working from home, travel restrictions, and component shortages delaying installations, the Hiperwall development team had a banner year producing three important product releases! Our team’s ability to remain productive while working remotely is a testament to the team’s creativity and drive and the commitment of everyone in the company. Since we make video wall software, we need access to specialized equipment, including well-configured networks and video walls for testing, neither of which tend to be in most people’s homes. Remote access, cameras, and some trips to the office allowed the team to perform excellent work under austere conditions.
We started the year with our benchmark Hiperwall 7.0 release. This release added fundamental improvements, including the groundbreaking Quantum viewer software to synchronize content playback across many computers driving many LED controllers. Because of this capability, Hiperwall has been deployed to drive enormous LED video walls in control rooms around the world. We also added new capabilities for source management and many other features and additions.
Mid-year, we announced a feature release version, Hiperwall 7.1, which included new fault-tolerance content (called HiperFailSafe Content), in addition to VMS plug-in support, so popular video management systems can directly interact with Hiperwall systems and add their content to the video wall. Many other features and performance improvements were also included.
As the third quarter ended, we released Hiperwall 7.2, which added new audio volume and muting controls. This is much more interesting and capable than it sounds because of the complexity of managing many audio devices and even more audio sources (movies, streams, etc.). We also added significant new capabilities to make our sources even more robust and compatible with industry standards.
As the new year begins, we have new features and releases under development and testing – I can’t wait to show you the great capabilities that are coming. I’m proud of our team and their accomplishments in 2021, and I expect 2022 will be even more amazing!
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