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About Video Walls

One canvas. A wall of screens.

A Video Wall turns a row, a grid or any arrangement of screens into one large canvas. You arrange the screens in the Video Wall editor exactly as they hang on the wall, assign one Content, Slide or Playlist, and every screen plays its own part of the picture. In Wallboard, a Video Wall is a special kind of device folder, so the wall's Devices, settings and reports stay together in one place.

Video Wall articles:

The first question: one device, or one device per screen?​

Every multi-screen installation starts with the same question: are the screens driven by one device with several outputs, or does each screen have its own device? The answer decides how the wall is set up.

One device, several outputs​

One player connected to four screens through its own outputs

A single player drives two or more screens through its own HDMI or DisplayPort outputs. The player renders the whole canvas and sends each part to a different output. This works only on supported player models, and it is set up with an advanced configuration on the device, not in the Video Wall editor.

Learn more: Multi-output devices

One device per screen​

Four screens, each with its own player, showing one shared picture

Each screen has its own player. You group the players into a Video Wall, arrange them in the Video Wall editor, and every player shows its own part of one shared canvas. This is what the Video Wall editor is for.

Which one do I need?​

Your wallVideo Wall editorMulti-output device
Every screen has its own player✅
One player is connected to all the screens through its own outputs✅
More screens than one player has outputs✅
You want to arrange the wall visually, without configuration files✅
Widgets and dynamic content across the whole wall✅✅
The classic soft matrix

Before the Video Wall editor, a picture across several players was built by hand: the media was cropped into pieces outside Wallboard, or a large master Content was embedded into a separate Content for every screen and cut to size with query parameters. Walls built that way keep working, but new walls are easier to build with the Video Wall editor. Learn more: Classic soft matrix (old method)

Why use a Video Wall​

Where Video Walls shine​

  • Lobbies and receptions: two screens side by side carrying one branded canvas.
  • Retail feature walls: screens of different sizes around a storefront, working as one display.
  • Venues and events: a large visual backdrop, planned before every screen is installed.
  • Control rooms: one large information canvas, with the screens' settings managed together.
  • Interactive ads: one sensor switches the whole wall at once, for example to a new ad when someone walks up. Learn more: How to Use Sensors with a Video Wall

What the editor gives you​

  • No slicing by hand. Forget cutting videos into pieces in video editing software, or planning the whole layout with guidelines in an image editor. Create a slot for every screen, whatever its size and position, choose the Content, and Wallboard does the slicing.

  • A seamless picture across the frames. You enter the real sizes and the gap between the screens in millimeters, and the picture continues behind the frames as if you were looking through a window. Lines and shapes that cross from one screen to the next stay straight, with no break at the seams.

    A line crossing two screens: broken at the seam with the gap at 0 mm, straight with the measured gap

    Learn more: The gap is what makes the picture line up

  • Every screen does only its share of the work. Each Device renders only its own part of the canvas and skips the widgets outside it, so every player carries its share of the wall instead of all of it.

  • Any shape of wall. Start from a grid of identical panels, or place screens of different sizes and orientations exactly where they hang. Empty slots hold the place of screens that are not installed yet.

  • Run the whole wall from one page. See what the wall is playing and the status of every screen, change settings for all screens at once, refresh or clear their cache together, and check Proof of Play.

Compared with the classic soft matrix​

In the classic soft matrix every device renders the whole canvas; with the Video Wall editor each device renders only its own part

  • The classic way made every player carry the whole wall. In the master Content route, every screen's Content loaded the entire master Content and then showed only a window of it, which is why videos performed poorly. A Video Wall lets each player render its own part only.
  • One Content instead of one per screen. There are no extra Contents per screen, no Content widgets and no query parameters to calculate. You assign the Content once, to the whole wall.
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