I am looking for something quite specific and I am not sure if this kind of thing is possible to do, but maybe you guys can help. BTW I am currently in Germany and this is for a mid sized company.
What I am looking to do:
So there is a computer/server that needs to output different things to several monitors, that are in other areas of the campus. All of this should run over the network/ethernet, HDMI cables are too short and would mean that new cables would have to be put in place. Not an option.
If there are any questions just post them and I will answer/specify.
a) hdmi to ethernet converter I found them in the pricey and non-pricey variety. Can't say much else about them. b) already preconfigured digital signage solutions can't say anything else about them, you might have seen them in German railway and subway stations (Ströer makes them i belive) c) Remote Desktop protocols teamviewer is probably out due to licensing, but vnc is still an option. d) webserver and thin clients depending on what you want to display a webserver and a thin client that refreshes via some scripting might be enough
So what are you going to display? Video? Static imagery? Subliminal propaganda?
Option a) was my first thought too, but they are, for the distance I need to cover, extremely expensive. What I am thinking about right now is something like a Raspberry Pi, except that one can't run full Windows, so I'm probably gonna go with the Intel compute stick.
Or you could virtualise each display and then just do a vnc stream making the configuration of the pi pretty minimal. The Intel Stick is ~100 Euro more expensive than a pi (including accessories), a potential issue depending on the number of monitors.
I'm not exactly sure what will be displayed, but what I know is that each display needs to be controlled independently. I was told that this will all run off one server/computer with software that will be written specifically for this. Your idea sounds interesting, but will this run on the Pi 2? Because using the Pi was my first idea too, but it only runs a very locked down version of Windows, so that is no use, hence the Intel stick...
wish i could help more, my buddy does this for a living i'm trying to get ahold of him. how far down the rabbit hole do you want/need to go? iptv video over LAN is def a thing. Here is a quick pdf on some issues you might run into. It helps if you are setting up from scratch you should be getting tv's that are network addressable. no need for conversion to hdmi then.
VNC runs fine on the Pi. It's probably the cheaper option to cut costs at the displaying end and then just dump a strong CPU in the machine that runs the software.
The question is: How many of the instances of this software are running? Only one on the host computer? Then you have to do screen-sharing via VNC or similar protocols. Multiple instances? Then running it on the endpoints might be usefull, like a compute stick, than we have to think about the computational needs of the software.