Looking for a solution that is tricky and risky! I have two different Digital Signage solutions for a tradeshow and I need playlists to run in sync so the booth can display fully synced media for a “swoosh” effect across a ton of screens. The other DS solution allows me to start a playlist from a specific start time, say 8:00AM then runs all “players” (mac mini’s) in sync using an NTP time server IE: 129.6.15.28.
Is there a similar solution for info-beamer solution?
Not synced based on a start time. The video wall packages also sync based on NTP only but they use the playlist duration to calculate a common start time. Right now that start time is January 1st 1970 and not “today at 8am”. So there’s no immediate way to achieve this with any of the available packages. It would be possible to add that with a bit of work though. Essentially it boils down to adding a new option to set both a time zone (so 8am is actually meaningful) and the time itself.
As I’ve seen a few tradeshows already: Just a quick note that info-beamer isn’t an offline system. An at least somewhat working connection is required at least every few ours.
Thanks Florian for reply. In my tradeshow experience I get a good 10 to 12hrs of synced playback before I notice “frame drift” between screens when I can’t hard-net the devices. Luckily the new RPI4’s are now using 5ghz WiFi spectrum so keeping wireless Pi’s synced will be less of an issue since that 5ghz is less busy traffic wise.
So it was good enough™?
The Pi3B+ (but not the Pi3) support 5Ghz as well. So you might also use those. The Pi4 isn’t supported yet. It’s still a bit of work until info-beamer can be used for anything serious on the Pi4. You can follow the progress on that on Raspberry Pi 4 release and info-beamer information.
No freakin way! I did not know B+ units will work with 5ghz! Thanks!