Should I choose a Raspberry Pi (RP) as a media player for my digital signage network?
Dave Haynes, on his sixteen-nine blog had put out a blog article – “116,200 Reasons To Not Dismiss Raspberry Pi As A Digital Signage Option”. Apparently one of his articles that had a list of digital signage solutions using RP as a base, had some of the largest page views on his blog! That got me thinking…I wanted to research this further to see what is really going on. Why are people so interested? So, here is my two cents on whether you should or should not use RP as a media player.
Enough has been written about why you should choose a combination of robust commercial hardware and software to run your digital signage network. But there is a huge subset of businesses who are looking to go down the RP path simply because it is cheap and is a fraction of the cost of a commercial grade player. Let us look at the advantages this little piece of technology bring to the table.
Pros:
- It is incredibly cheap. You can’t beat it at $50 a pop.
- There is a large community of RP developers and hobbyists all over the internet.
- It is small and efficient. It has low power consumption and compact size.
Now I am sure why it gets lot of page views! Simply because it is incredibly cheap!! But one thing that pops out in the research to me, is that it looks like a solution that needs lot of development support. Let’s see how the negatives stack up against the RP.
Cons:
- The Raspberry Pi works best when it is used for simple presentations – like texts and images.
- It is not very good with videos purely because of its limited graphics capability. Sorry I have to geek out here! – The version of chrome on Pi does not support GPU accelerated video decoding. This results in poor video playback.
- The Pi uses SD cards for storage and playback. SD cards are notoriously unreliable. They are simply not meant to be run 24/7. RP themselves recommend switching it out every 12 months.
- SD cards are slow. To write, read and play of SD cards day in and day out will mean that the card will overheat and freeze.
From what I can garner from my research is that your CMS and player software should be incredibly optimized in order to run smoothly on the Pi. Even then it cannot go beyond 1080P. With 4K screens increasingly becoming the status quo, I am not sure about its usage. And when you throw in video walls and other large format deployments such as LED billboards, the RP quickly becomes a non-option.
At best it can be a single screen or a limited experimental implementation, if you are technically minded with a lot of time on your hands. For a professional multi-format multi-site implementation across a spread out geography it is best to go in for a proven digital solution with commercial grade infrastructure at its core.
I hope this article has provided you with some insight to make an informed decision on choosing your digital signage platform. We would love to work with you in implementing a world-class digital signage network and help take your business to the next level.
Do visit us online for more information. We are ready. Send us a brief!