Edinburgh Fringe Pi?

[Alanpi92]

I noticed one of the big Edinburgh Fringe venues - Gilded Baloon - has what looks like a rapsbery pi behind the information screen in the bar displaying show information and videos ( but with the show adverts as well )

Does anyone know what software this is running ? I've seen information screens before but this doesn't look like a web browser and sometimes there's video at the same time as the graphics - are they just some sort of remote VNC display perhaps ? Is this possible with video ?

They also seem to be synchronised perfectly which I wouldn't think possible with a "slideshow" app.

I was thinking this would work well in my local (small) cinema if it's simple

[KenT]

Could be Pi Presents, see sig. But sounds like Pi Presents would do what you want.

[rsmck]

It's a completely bespoke thing (although mainly web based) for Gilded Balloon which integrates with Fringe Box Office and a few of their back end systems - glad you like it

They had a number of unique requirements, and this is the first year it's been used, so it's a bit of a beta really anyway the objectives were;

• Show information must update from Fringe box office
• Support pushing video clips
• Central control of all screens
• Can change slides centrally.
• The "coming up" is sychronised across any screen displaying it.
• Has to be able to show live video (Late'n'Live every night) on demand

It seems to have been quite well received, so it'll get improved for next year.

[rsmck]

btw.. where did you see the Pi, I thought we'd hidden them all quite well, not that we're trying to hide the fact that they're being used - more just that it means people can't poke at them!

[Alanpi92]

Thanks !

So is it just a web page ? How did you include video - it's always really slow when I've tried.

The one I saw was in the bar mounted on a balcony - the pi is behind the TV but out of reach - was just curious

Is the content on the pi then ?

[liz]

Hi rsmck - we'd love to hear more about what you've done here; Dom suggested, and I agree, that it might make for an interesting post for the front page. Would you mind mailing me at liz@raspberrypi.org if you get a minute? (I should point out: we LOVE lots of pictures.)

[rsmck]

Liz - it's really not that interesting ... thanks for the message though, will drop you an eMail and see if I can get some pics.

Alan - It's sort of a web page, the output is mostly constructed in the local browser using jQuery - the actual data feed to the screens is just JSON - the video is played using the h264 hardware decoder as an overlay (if that makes any sense) so it's not using <embed> or anything like that (which we did try and didn't work!) The only content on the pi is the video clips which are pushed out to them automatically and synchronized across the network, the rest is pushed over the network (but it's a private internal LAN, they're not on the internet, so pretty fast - same as is used to stream live video at night which works reasonably well, I'd be happier if it was multicast video but I couldn't get it to work properly in time)

The nice thing about this arrangement is the data use - the ones that don't do the live video use about 20Mb / day - which gives you an idea how much bandwidth they're using - this is a big advantage over VNC or any sort of remote display technology