Networking 15 tvs off one server

[hangman53]

have up to 15 tv that i need to run off a main server, would want to be able to show different feed to each tv or same to all. also would be good if other pc's could access it to send info to any of the 15 screens. - any help??

 

[linux_0]

15 VGA LCDs? 15 standard def TVs or 15 high def TVs?

What kind of hardware do you have? How do you plan to hook them together? What kind of content are you going to have?

Driving that many VGA displays or TVs is not going to be trivial.

 

[audiovoodoo]

Hmmm... sounds like you need to be looking at network streaming devices. No reason you couldn't have 15 of them, one plugged into each TV and pull media from a central file store. Not sure if that would let you push content or just how much it would cost though.

 

[linux_0]

Driving 15 displays at 1600x1200x32 @60Hz would be rather expensive. Actually it would probably have to be 4x4 for a total of 16 displays.

Streaming HD video to 15 displays would also be very expensive, you'd need a very fast LAN and a big server.

 

[Pyroflea]

A gigabit network running at 100% speed (which it never will, due to various bottlenecks throughout the system) can only reach 125MBps. If you're streaming HD, there's no way the network would be able to keep up.

 

[linux_0]

For full HD you would need 10gigE or 100gigE and even then it might not be enough.

HDMI Type B is rated at 20.4gbps that's equal to two 10gigE interfaces at full speed, which as Pyroflea already pointed out is almost never achieved and you have latency issues.

If you're trying to stream low res, low bitrate then it might work.

What are you trying to do? What kind of hardware do you have? How do you plan to hook them together? What are you trying to stream? What's the res, bitrate and format you're going to use? How far apart are the 15 displays?

 

[amdfangirl]

What is he trying to do again??

 

[audiovoodoo]

There was never any mention of HD in the OP, also you could multi home a linux box, RAID 0 the disks and push quite a lot of data even from a modest server. 15 TV's are unlikely to be HD, and if they are he should have the money for more toys... or not!

 

[linux_0]

Driving 15 TVs, even at SD is not going to be a cakewalk. The OP gave no info to go on.

You can't network regular TVs either, without special equipment.

@OP please give more info.

 

[MrLinux]

The usual method would be something like VLC on the server, use Video over IP to feed a network of SetTop Boxes, the problem is controlling what video feed goes where.

Or you can buy a system off the shelf http://www.tripleplay-services.com/index.php/TripleTV-Innovative-IPTV-Solution/

 

[MU_Engineer]

have up to 15 tv that i need to run off a main server, would want to be able to show different feed to each tv or same to all. also would be good if other pc's could access it to send info to any of the 15 screens. - any help??

You would probably be best served by a client-server type of setup with one main server serving several client PCs that are directly attached to the TVs. Playing back raw video over networked X would be the easiest but you will have ridiculous bandwidth demands doing that to 15 different screens. Here's roughly what you would want to do:

1. Set up the server to stream encoded video files to the client PCs, such as MPEG-2 video. You will want to have gigabit Ethernet for your setup as serving 15 1080p files at once will take somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-8 MB/sec and GbE has a real throughput of something like 115-120 MB/sec. If your files are nearer the 8 MB/sec size, then you may want to bond two GbE links together from the server to the router.

2. Have the client PCs decode and play back the streamed video to their directly-attached TV screens. You can control the PCs by ssh or even by an IP KVM or an IPMI-type card to control the playback. I don't know your physical setup, but you may only be able to run one screen per client PC. If the screens are in close proximity to another, set each client PC to have a GPU with two outputs and then put one screen on each output and run it in a separate X session.

This sounds like a pretty big undertaking and there are a lot of other details missing, such as where the video is coming from and such.