It was already hot when we left Las Vegas, and it was really hot when we arrived at Valley of Fire State Park. When we pulled up to Atlatl Rock for a quick picnic lunch, we saw a bit of commotion. Some bighorn sheep were searching for shade and perhaps some water, so lots of people were photographing them (including me, obviously).
Atlatl Rock has a bunch of petroglyphs high up the side of a rock face. Some scorching hot stairs climb up to these marks made by ancient people. I was intrigued with the lichen growing on the rock face as we walked to the stairs. Sadly, some graffiti “artists” have defaced some of the petroglyphs, but they are still spectacular.
After our lunch, we drove on to Arch Rock and parked to look for it. We walked around a rock formation and to a clearing and then looked back and there it was! Had we only crossed the road, we could have seen it. There also were fascinating holes eroded into the rock beneath the arch.
After that, we decided it was too hot to spend too much more time at Valley of Fire, so we’ll have to come back next time we’re in the area. We had to get to Zion National Park, and we knew we would lose an hour when we entered Utah because of time zone differences, so we headed out the east entrance and up to the I-15 for our trip towards St. George, UT and on to Springdale and Zion.
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!
In June 2024, my wife and I went on a driving trip, starting with the InfoComm tradeshow in Las Vegas, then continuing on to sightseeing in Nevada and Utah. This page will be kept updated with links as I create pages for each segment of the trip.
Note that you can click on any of the pictures to see a larger version.
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.
