Synchronisation vs ghosted screen vs multi-output media player

When looking at non-standard video walls, such as 1x2, 1x3, and so on it gets a bit harder because you are no longer using a standard 16:9 or 9:16 aspect ratio. The screens tiling mode will stretch the content from the source media player, but if you are only using 2 or 3 screens, the content is going to appear distorted.

There are three options when dealing with these types of setups:

Synchronisation is a feature within Fusion Signage available with our Advanced and Pro licences that uses each individual screen or media player to display content, but uses a server to keep each screen playing at the same time.

Benefits:

Detriments:

To set up or test synchronisation refer to this page.

This is the easiest and most cost effective way to achieve a non-standard video wall. Ghosted screen or screen(s) refers to pretending as if your screens are in a standard video wall layout, but moving and removing physical screens to match your actual deployment.

Benefits:

Detriments:

For example, if we wanted to create a 1x3 landscape array we pretend like it’s a 2x2. On the left is how the media player and content think the screens are set up, on the right is how they are actually set up. Notice the fourth screen doesn’t exist.

Why do we need to do this?

You won’t be able to use the tiling mode with these odd resolution arrays, because the content being sent to the first screen is just stretched over the remaining three.

Let’s say we want to achieve this:

If we were to try and use a normal video wall tiling mode, we would try and create an image called Sunrise.png that was 5,760 x 1080 pixels (which is 3 screens each 1920px wide = 5,760px, and 1080px high).

However, if we try and deploy this to a media player that can’t match that resolution, it’s going to be fit, filled, or stretched to the screen which is 16:9 aspect ratio. Because the media player is assuming there is a single screen, it will look like one of the below:

When you use the tiling mode on the screens, it is going to take that source, and display it across three screens.

Stretch will get the closest, however the loss of resolution will be noticeable and distortion evident.

Fit will drag the black bars across all the screens.

Fill will crop out and distort a large portion of the content.

So this is where screen ghosting comes into play. We want to keep the content as 16:9 aspect ratio to ensure the tiling mode stretches it correctly across the screens.

So when dealing with a 1x3 array as above, we can actually set this up as a 2x2 standard video wall, but just leave out (or “ghost”) the fourth screen. Then instead of physically installing the third screen at the bottom left, we put it to the right of screen 2. Now we have the 1x3 we want, but content will be created in 16:9.

When creating content, you can just account for a gap in the bottom right where the fourth screen would be and leave it blank. As the third screen has been physically installed next to the second screen in the top right, it looks correct.

This same setup can be used for more screens as well:

1x4: Set up as 2x2 and don’t ghost any screens

1x5: Set up as a 3x3 video wall, and ghost screens 4-9.

As you use larger arrays (3x3 and higher) there will start to be a loss of quality in your content, however this would be similar to any standard video wall setup.

You can avoid this by using a more powerful media player that supports 8K content (or higher), using a multi-output media player for pixel perfect output, or using synchronisation between each player.

Multi-output media players can be used however there are specific requirements for the graphics card to support displaying our Fusion Signage application across multiple screens.

These solutions are typically more expensive than the other options, and more technical in terms of setup and content creation requirements. The benefit however is you will have pixel perfect content across multiple displays with no delay in synchronisation.

Benefits:

Detriments:

Any media player that supports more than one HDMI or DisplayPort output to a screen. Most commonly devices will have 2 outputs, but can go up to 32. This means a single media player can be connected to 2+ screens and drive content to each of them. A mini-computer can be built with dedicated graphics cards to scale up the number of screens to 32 (using Nvidia Mosaic for example)

The single player will connect to each screen via HDMI (or DisplayPort) cables.

Even though Android players can come with multiple outputs, in our testing they only support duplicate on the screen. There are separate apps which can allow you to manually add content to each screen, however Fusion Signage does not natively support Android multi-screen devices.

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