What Is a Video Wall Controller?
Video Wall Controllers
The video wall controller is generally a 19” rack compatible computer chassis with operating system handling different input and output signals. The video wall processor receives different input signals through HDMI, DVI, SDI, video or other cables or even through the LAN. The controller has several outputs, usually controlling multiple monitors or screens. The video wall screen is a coherent screen of multiple displays usually 4×4, 6×2, 8×2 or up to 172×44 arrangements. Over these screens the information can be displayed in any position and size regardless of the monitor borders. The total resolution of the video wall is the sum of the individual monitors’ resolution.
Over this video wall, a large coherent Windows 10 or Windows Server 2019 desktop is displayed by the controller. This is a graphics desktop where any standard windows desktop applications or operating system services can be rendered. You can display and work with any web browsers and open any desired webpage. All webpages appear live and you can have multiple browser windows opened parallel.
Any of the windows and applications that might be used to complete your daily work can be moved around with a simple drag and drop operation over the video wall surface.
Additionally, to these standard Windows graphic applications, you can use SCADA and any Office applications like Excel and Power Point, or even mapping applications that can run in the graphics background.
Overlay windows
The users also have the possibility to display live overlay windows from HDMI, HDBaseT, legacy video and SDI inputs. These live inputs are displayed in real time and scaled to the desired position and size. These overlay inputs can overlap with the graphics windows and with each other of course.
All in all, we can display media players, satellite receivers, Blu-ray players or even PC outputs displaying operator workstations’ screens. Thus, the video wall has a combined function displaying Windows graphics and overlays from different inputs.
User interface
FOLAIDA video wall system can be controlled by an intelligent graphics user interface called FOLAIDA Control that can run locally or on any number of networked operator workstations who are sitting in front of the video wall. This operation needs installation of the program package to that certain operator PCs running Windows 10 operating system.
There is an extra Web browser based remote control service also, called FOLAIDA Control. This solution uses arbitrary Web browser technology that is HTML5 compliant. So, the user can control the FOLAIDA box from Windows, iOS, Android, Linux devices as for example mobile phones or tablets also.
The Preview option of the FOLAIDA video wall controllers makes possible to see the live preview of the input sources which allows the user to see what is being displayed over the video wall even from a remote location.
Layout Management
The layout management programs contain services to design and recall complex wall layouts. We can assign pre-designed layouts to each of the layout buttons. Users can set up and manage graphics application and browser windows with pre-defined content or attributes also.
The user-friendly user interface supports operators to work in native language as English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Russian.
Summary
Video walls and video wall controllers can be used for traffic control, police command center, industrial process supervision, in mission critical control rooms whereas can be used as a LED wall controller or video wall display controller. A FOLAIDA video wall solution is a coherent screen of multiple monitors, over these screens we can display graphics information that are compatible with Windows 10 operating system. Additionally, we can display inputs from HDMI, HDBaseT or even LAN based inputs. We can also combine the inputs and the graphics windows to have a real time and great experience for the customers.
