large video screens on buildings

[cteno4]

We've talked in the past about using various portable DVRs in buildings for doing big video screens. You can get these cheap at like less than $10 or use an old smart phone etc, but problem with most of them is you have to reset them when you power them up and unless you have a remote or easy access to the touch screen if it has one its a pain. replacing video, flash or fiddling with it could be a real pain once in the building. another problem is the cheaper DVRs only have a decoder for free and obscure codecs for your digital video and trying to get stuff encoded properly was a pain. software provided was horrible and in many cases did not work...

 

nice little lcd monitors with ntsc input would be really nice. once in place you never have to really fiddle with it as power it up and it just shows what ever video is fed to it. problem is they have not been cheap. 

 

well finally there is a use that is driving these lcd screens cheaper and thats for backup cameras in cars! you can now find them for less than $20 on ebay and other discount electronics sources. then just provide it with a video stream from a little dvd player or cheap mpeg playback box (raspberry pi is nifty) that you can set up to just start playing on power up. also this lets you do fun things like plug in a little wired (or wireless) spy camera into them to show an interesting scene you cant normally see. like put a camera inside your station and then have a little lcd on the side of the layout hat you see whats going on inside.

 

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=backup+monitor&LH_BIN=1&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2045573.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.Xbackup+monitor+lcd&_nkw=backup+monitor+lcd&_sacat=0

 

i may resurrect my buildings with screens in them. i got tired of the dvrs blowing out and managing the device w/in the building. second version has been a royal pain to get files converted to work with it.

 

cheers

 

jeff