But can the display play back 4K Dolby Vision video, with True HD, or DTS-HD-MA audio? My TV can, from my (RPI4) Plex server, in direct playback mode. Or from Disney Plus etc. Probably not.
I'd highly recommend installing pi-hole. I installed it like 3 weeks ago. Never seen a single Ad on the Tv. But the amount of requests that get blocked is just nuts.
5:41 about the remote working, as it's showing in the top right of the screen it's using cec or consumer electronics control, this is a protocol to have the display communicate with the connected device (the pi) over HDMI. LibreELEC also supports this when using other PIs connected via HDMI to a TV. (or at least the pi zero I have does)
It would be great if TV operating systems were more open along with the hardware, this has such modular setup potential. Imagine if you could wipe away 5-10 year old samsung/lg/whatever OS on older TVs and install a fresh lightweight linux option, would give them a lot more life and usefulness (or even just swap out the SoC). With big TVs like this there are lots of options for modular hardware, something like the bigger Intel NUC compute element could easily slot into one of these and be a powerhouse home theater option, hell the TV itself could be the home plex server...
@@mod4rchive As someone who has a circa 2009 Samsung TV, if they're one of the best, then all the rest must be the worst garbage in town. Even when it was brand new it was slow and hyper annoying. Especially when bad signal caused it to lockup, sometimes until you pull the power cord.
Of of the manufacturers--I want to say TCL--was very up-front about the fact that it actually costs more these days to sell a "dumb" TV than a Smart TV, because the latter will be subsidized by the expected user data collection revenue. That is to say, these is zero incentive for anyone to make an open OS TV, as it would be even more expensive to cater to the (sadly) extremely niche audience of folks who want smart devices but care about privacy or moddability.
When we were up for our last TV purchase I was blown away that there are no "dumb" TVs available anymore. It's almost like these companies are selling our usage data and greed is making their decisions for them. /s Thanks for the intro to this concept. I think this is pretty cool stuff and I like the concept of knowing what code is running on equipment that I own.
Selfishly, I actually kinda like it. The prices are heavily subsidized by companies like Netflix and Amazon who pay the manufacturers for including dedicated buttons on the remotes and selling them usage data, so I get it much cheaper and then I just connect it to my HTPC and never use any of that crap (hell, I don't even connect the TV to the Internet).
@@hellterminator I thought a similar approach would work well for us until the built-in "smart" software started crashing regularly. It's frustrating to have a TV that works fine as a display but keeps being kneecapped by the computer inside it. The dedicated buttons on the remote are annoying as any accidental press will exit the input it was on. It also doesn't help that those dedicated buttons take up a majority of the remote faceplate, increasing odds they will be accidentally pressed. Almost like it is intentional... Own nothing and like it? No thanks, not for me.
@@gannas42 Well, that sucks. My TV doesn't crash. And I don't even use the remote - the only thing I need the TV to do is turn on and off and my HTPC handles that through CEC.
The reason that you can use your remote is its using a CEC module to talk to the Pi. is a communications protocol built into the HDMI standard allowing CEC-enabled HDMI devices to exchange information and send/receive control messages.
@@arjix8738 The Raspberry Pi usually have specific components to decode video. That allows it to decode high resolution video and also use less power than it would it it was decoding via CPU.
NEC displays have been my go to choice for business applications. I always get arguments from people complaining that they are too expensive. They see the prices of TVs at Best Buy and Costco and think, "What's the difference?" I always explain that the commercial displays are built for commercial applications, they are but to last and be on for long periods of time. Furthermore, consumer TV warranties often do not cover the TV when installed outside of someone's house. I don't need or want a SmartTV with a Netflix button on the remote in a conference room. I want a large display, not a large TV. Great video, I'm going to show this to people who challenge me on why I spec a commercial display in the future.
You know what the best part about these is. My school has a lot of these hanging everywhere. I realised it as soon as they crashed. They do that a lot and the school is to lazy to reboot them.
I wish we could still buy "dumb" TVs, with no smart features, which could just have all their settings controlled by whatever media player box we're using.
I have 2. This video might be over my head and I just don't get it. I have a 50 inch dumb tv with a windows 7 PC and pi 3b hooked up. In my kitchen I have a 32 inch ( I am using it right now) with Nvidia Shield box. Both use keyboard and mouse, gamepads. So I just do not understand the hype for this monitor he is showing. Ok mine are not built in, but Velcro or build a bracket behind tv a connect with HDMI. What's the difference?
@@davefarley4318 thats the catch lol, the only dumb tv nowadays are mediocre displays compared to the rest of the market (its a walmart brand afterall) and dont expect 99% of the actual good displays will come with smart functionality
A lot of these types of display run centralised signage software to control the layout and content. You can usually define an area of the screen to pick up live video streams from the network, like multicast or RTSP. Needless to say, there are Linux based, open source, signage projects like Xibo you can use, so if you have a machine with a TV tuner card, you could stream TV across your LAN to your non-TV signage display.
Yep, spent $13k on a display from them for a Hendrick dealership I worked at. Freaking amazing displays. Especially for outdoor use. Humidity didn't bother it, bright enough to display even with direct sunlight!
2:07 I was tempted to buy one of these for like £50 from an e-waste recycler before. I would love to setup a giant touchscreen like that with Home Assistant in my home.
Those things are great. We use them as information displays in our fire and rescue stations, where they show general information such as time, weather, tide and specialized info such as current ressource status or in case of an alarm a data overlay about the new mission, site, action type etc...
These NECs are also used 24/7 in manufacturing on large production lines, displaying multiple statistics to operators and supervisors, allowing them to see at a glance during their process adjustments spec readings in real time without being tied down to a workstation monitor.
I thought it was going to be a chore to find a non-smart TV to replace the one that just died, but I wasn't expecting that I would be replacing it with a store display. This is fantastic news!
@@gibbsfreenthalpy There were at least 3-4 options on the sitelink Jeff provided that were 4k resolution under $1000; when you consider that they should last at least 10 years and probably more, it's not that bad -- compared to giving up your freedom and advertising info + your TV is spying on you and using your internet bandwidth
@@kingneutron1 huh, ok, didn't see that, sry. I just roughly know the price we paid, and that was definitely more, even considering that we bought about 50-60 of them...
@@kingneutron1 How's it spying on you if you don't connect it to the internet? This whole concept seems a bit far fetched to me. In terms of value, you're way better off buying a smart TV, leaving it disconnected from the internet, and hooking up a HTPC or Raspberry Pi with internet access.
I picked up an ‘older’ NEC display to use with my streaming box. For being only 1080, it has amazing color accuracy, smooth motion and best of all, none of the clunkiness and unnecessary features of a smart TV.
It's almost jarring watching you do videos, and then see so much stuff from where I live. It's so rare to find a 'tuber that's in the area! I need to keep en eye out, maybe I'll bump into you on of these days!
My last TV, I bought it based on the screen specs because I knew it would get outdated pretty fast. Also refurbished, pretty sure someone didn't like the lack of some smart features
Small world, I just bought my glasses from he lady at the @1:39 mark! I've been in to Pi's for a while now and just found your channel! See you at the Galleria one day!
Great timing on this! I have a few Pis running as dashboards for processes at work, simply refreshing an internal website every few minutes to get updated data. I'm planning on transitioning to something better where I could mix the page in with company announcements and other dashboards. I'd love to see a video about doing something like this with an open-source software.
The coolest use of displays I've seen in a store (and a mall store at that) was the Microsoft store(rip), where they had displays basically wrapping around the walls.
There was this furniture store we had, (we still have it) and it had a commercial that did really well. They had wraparound displays showing all of their commercials in one of their branches after that.
Oh hey, I have an older 1080p model of one of these! Recovered it from a long abandoned business location It currently runs as my primary monitor on my desktop. This displays surprisingly good for just about damn near anything you could throw at it, I was surprised it even still worked when I found it lmao
Most companies will skip a commercial display, and go for a $300 residential display, and replace it every 2 years. We usually use Screenly. Been using it for years and years. The free version is call OSE.
Great video. I work in the signage industry and love these displays a lot and wish I could work with them more. But getting some small shop to actually buy them at this price, instead of the cheapest TV at Best Buy and then just using a FireTV stick, is very difficult. Signage has a lot of options and most go with the cheapest solution. I'm in SoCal and when I go through McD's drive through around the area, I see that the "TVs" the chose to use are failing big time. So if McD's can't even afford to install these, then Joe's sunglass hut probably won't either :)
Yeah; I have noticed some places cheap out, and within months, the TV is washed out or really, really dim (especially if they place it somewhere exposed to sunlight for part of the day). And at that point, since they invested in the setup their using, they just go with it (since the dull image isn't as noticeable if you've just seen it every day a tiny bit less) and don't feel like they could switch to a proper display at some point :(
We had these at my previous job, and they didn’t actually last longer than off the shelf standard consumer TVs. They basically lasted a bit past their 3 year warranty and started having backlight issues. They were run 24/7 as signage displays and had plenty of airflow around them. Meanwhile, there are several consumer model TVs that preexisted my employment there (more than 5 years ago) that are run 24/7 for the same purpose (meeting room listings, and digital signage) that are still running today
This video is embedded on Sharp-NEC's SOC page for their signage. Congrats! Oh, and the Pi does have hardware h.265 (hevc) decoding and will do 4K fine, if you encoded it properly. If it doesn't, then Handbrake is your friend.
I don't know haha, but in Malaysia we have a very reliable official store that, i saw, has stocks that are available once a week, 10/20 of them once, but usually comes with package, that sucks, but sometimes i got the pi just with a $10 sd card, It's name is Cytron Technologies
Back in 2009 I had to buy a new tv to replace my old CRT tv I'd had since 2003. Well I found a 50" flat panel tv from Sharp and decided it'd be a perfect replacement. At the time it cost me right around $1000. Get this, I still have that tv and it works beautifully! It's being used in my recording studio as a computer monitor, but also has Roku, a Blu-Ray player and a DVD player all hooked up to it. So I can watch movies, surf the web, record music, etc., etc. Sharp have always made some great electronics!
its great to see that raspberry pi integrations are now available for commercial use interesting to see how many of them are already probably at use at stores, i have to keep an eye open next time im in a store so i can maybe spot one of those lol
Not that I'm interested in buying a "This is not a TV" the commentator sure makes me want one, he's concise and informative in the delivery of information 🤔 Great video, Jeff Geerling, maybe the best INFORMATIONAL video I've seen on UA-cam👌👍
how about DRM streaming services, I can't seem to get these to work on my linux desktop due to DRM (widevine L1) not being supported, I'm guessing it will be the same for pi based media centers? Lets say for amazon prime hd, can't get that one to work.
For consumer TV, you can buy demo units. 12 years ago, I bought a demo unit. It has one great feature: a glass panel in front of the screen! I also suspect a better build, because it's still doing great in all aspect. I also got it cheaper than the original product, because it was already used. A friend who bought it with me didn't want in the first place, so I explained him that those TVs are made to be on display every day while the store is open, plus the glass pane that makes it sturdier. I bought back my part a few years later. A bit expensive, but that TV was expensive and the price was still right.
I had two of these. Amazing when you understand that these are huge monitors/advertising exhibition displays. They're actually super nice and with heaps of connectors... Just no eArc ;)
It's funny you pointed out webOS as the proprietary operating system :) That's based on the open source webOS from Palm and HP years ago. LG still maintains the current repo. webOS OSE.
still got my hp touchpad (at least thats had more updates/life than my now defunct ipad3) with a gazillion updates/improvements on it and a pre3 collecting dust somewhere.
Hey Jeff, great video! Really enjoyed seeing RPis in use IRL! Super cool! Also, I wanted to say this video had a really high production value, which was cool! On the other hand I also enjoy the less produced stuff because it comes off as more you (like Red Shirt Jeff :) ). Either way, great video!
The serial port might seem odd, but RS-232 was the standard way of controlling displays and projectors before CEC came along, and continues to be used in the "pro" market. My projector has a serial port and it has been very useful in automating my home theatre.
Finally a tv that doesnt take almost if not all of your data. tbh, it shouldve always been that way. Nice to see that Sharp NEC prioritized on the essential first.
Check the links in the description-this model is somewhere around $1500 USD, so I didn't want to focus too much on price, since it's not something the average consumer would probably consider.
@@JeffGeerling I replied to another comment, if you go to the sitelink you provided and sort by price, once you get past the "contact us" junk there are at least 3-4 options for 4K resolution displays under $1k :)
This reminds me of my first flat tv was a $4000 commercial Panasonic 50 plasma with a similar blade system that allowed input upgrading I loved that tv!
Hello fellow St. Louisan! I have hooked PC's up to my televisions for years. I watched this video and am typing up this comment on a 720p plasma hooked up to an Core i5 HTPC. I also picked up one of those LG C1 OLED 55 inch TVs about 9 months ago. The picture is BEAUTIFUL. The built in speakers are no slouches either. I have it hooked up to a PC, but I did give the smart functions a try. They are actually quite good for what they are. I still prefer a PC hooked up to the TV though.
Yeah, those setups are pretty good. I worked with older NEC screens, which were a part of some kiosk system which I had to repurpose in serveral of our offices. It had to be done cheap, so some PI's and a rescheduled screen did the trick. When we went into lockdown in 2020 I left the PI's on, when I returned a few months ago they were still running lol.
In the LUV shopping center in Lübeck (Schleswig-Holstein, Germany) there's one store that uses RPiOS with a program running on top to entertain the children whose parents are shopping. It doesn't even hide the mouse cursor!
Funnily enough one of the shops near my place has one, for the last few weeks its bugged out, so its displaying linux error codes, so i wondered if it had a pi inside or some other arm computer
Love all this, definitely best type of TV. Pi is invented, designed and manufactured in west UK in Southern Wales. Amazing country to visit if you have the time. Beautiful place.
"Smarter than a Smart TV" oh gods no. What now, don't tell me they taught it to tell when I'm lying so it can interrogate me about brand preferences. Edit: oh so it's actually just a big display that can make for an actually good TV that won't spy on me.
Sooo... after next time you're not Jeff Geerling? (TIC). Great video as always man. Love your work. Everytime I get bored and just play games and don't do tech I always get the will to tinker back after watching videos like this one.
Seems like a 4k (UA-cam) capable pi will be ideal. Eagerly waiting for a snapdragon gen 3 type soc, 8 6x2 or 4x4 big.little with a nice adreno 730 or mali g78. Gonna need a passive heatsink but hey, I'll take a price bump to $45 for 4gb at that point. I don't need my big gaming pc all the time, so doing responsive browsing on a pi would be ideal instead of the pi/laptop combo.
RPI’s or aka virtual machines have been used in this capacity for over 10 years from what i can remember. manufactures use them to display company information and or production information to the employees.
Amazing that you could upgrade this thing in the future without having to toss the whole TV for a new one,I have a fairly modern Quantum Dot TV and while its picture quality is fantastic, I often find its UI to be slow and laggy,Most likely because it has a slow processor :/
I already found a lot of displays running with Rasperry Pis, but often the Pi just is strapped with some zip ties to the wires that go into the display. Such hacky setups are quite popular.
The fact that this setup is insanely expensive and at least one of the parts are not available to your average person makes this really cool but extremely impractical.
This is a couple major versions in-it's pretty darn stable, and worked as I expected (which is to say, way better than the terrible UIs I've worked with on all the consumer TVs I've ever used).
iS there any advantage to using this display when I can get a better Samsung display for the same price and just plug a raspberry pi directly to the TV display port?
One of the hospitals i trained at had 10k NEC displays in the ORs, mostly to display laparascopic or robotic imagery, sometimes to display radiographic imaging. There were some ORs that had the hires displays displaying the patient chart, lmao... So not all of them were well utilized.
FWIW, "Smart" TVs can act as just a monitor, to which you plug any (actually smart) device. The LG C2 I got asked that at first boot, and I'll probably do that when I can buy something that can output 4K HDR for the living room. It does come with a Jellyfin client, though...
Yodeck is my favorite cloud based display controller company. Based off Pi 4 units, and does do 4K. I bet it would work with this display very easily. Cheap too.
I have heard they last about 3 years (coincidentally when the warranty ends) and then start having backlight issues, but some of the ones I saw installed in around 2014 are still going strong today,
We need displays like this available to the public. I haven't plugged an aerial into my TV in about 20 years, set top box (cable or satellite) provides the signal to HDMI. All I want is a decent screen and a ton of HDMI ports.
Same here, and I'd be okay paying a 10-20% premium on the exact same display if they just ripped out all the adware stuff and their custom 'smart apps'.
I agree with needing more hdmi ports. I was lectured awhile back, when mentioning that point. He almost sounded irate, telling me there are very few people that care if a TV only has 2 hdmi ports. My current TV has 4, and I still use an additional hdmi switch on one of the ports. Along with component connections, which you cannot find on a TV these days.
I'm a tinkerer at heart, but definitely a battle when choosing something customizable but straight forward at the same time. I was originally looking at Google TV os, because of access to Android apps, but the profiles suck, the only thing the profiles do is separate the home suggestions, not your actual accounts in apps.
No wonder no one can buy a raspberry pi, if every store, shop retailer has at least one raspberry pi running their displays, the manufacturers can not keep up.What a success for a little board designed to teach.
Prague's buses have screens that show current and next 4 stations, as well as the direction and time. It is running on some crappy Celeron CPU, but they run Debian which is pretty cool. Seen them boot up early in the morning and one time a kernel panic during storm - I guess they don't have ECC memory lol.
This (apart from industrial build quality) is what i need. Just big screen, no tv receiver (I dont watch tv), I will "smartify" it myself better if need be.
The best part of this type of display is when it crashes. I have been traveling by train for a long time, in the 00's / early 2010's you mostly saw windows based errors when they failed, but nowadays they don't fail as much. When they do you see typical linux errors like a black screen with a xorg cursor or what I saw yesterday, one screen stuck at initramfs.
I work for a large screen manufacturer. We do large screens all day long. Anything from a single LCD to multi million dollar oversized LED walls. It’s a fun business and lots of travel.
Someday I want to look into LED walls... how they're constructed, how they're run, the full process from start to finish. They're fascinating, especially in how well modern video walls appear on TV/film nowadays (in the past, projection-based displays would look terrible in recordings).
@@JeffGeerling I work with large format video walls since 1997. Cubes, LCD, LED and Projection. I developed software, hardware, install and service all of it... and more. It's my daily bread. If you need some info... hit me up. :-)
The lengths you go to buy a Raspberry Pi these days. Shucking TV's for RPi's may become a thing :).
Haha I was thinking of saying that, but there are a few cheaper ways-not by much, but still... I'll talk about those next week ;)
HAHAHAHAAA!!!!! - At least you have a cool display to tinker with after you get that CM4 you've been looking for :D
wonder if it'd work with other CM4 compatible boards like Banana Pi's new compute module
But can the display play back 4K Dolby Vision video, with True HD, or DTS-HD-MA audio?
My TV can, from my (RPI4) Plex server, in direct playback mode. Or from Disney Plus etc.
Probably not.
@@JeffGeerling Good to hear! Because Pis are now 2-3x MSRP :(
The best feature of a display like this is that it doesn't come with all the malware that TVs ship with these days.
You can build your own! :-)
Malware & spyware
I'd highly recommend installing pi-hole. I installed it like 3 weeks ago.
Never seen a single Ad on the Tv. But the amount of requests that get blocked is just nuts.
What allot of people dont realize is that consumer TVs are actually subsidized to include this.
@@sagichdirdochnicht4653 how install this on a smart tv?
5:41 about the remote working, as it's showing in the top right of the screen it's using cec or consumer electronics control, this is a protocol to have the display communicate with the connected device (the pi) over HDMI. LibreELEC also supports this when using other PIs connected via HDMI to a TV. (or at least the pi zero I have does)
It would be great if TV operating systems were more open along with the hardware, this has such modular setup potential. Imagine if you could wipe away 5-10 year old samsung/lg/whatever OS on older TVs and install a fresh lightweight linux option, would give them a lot more life and usefulness (or even just swap out the SoC). With big TVs like this there are lots of options for modular hardware, something like the bigger Intel NUC compute element could easily slot into one of these and be a powerhouse home theater option, hell the TV itself could be the home plex server...
Samsung OS is actually one of the best. The problem with smart tv is they use garbage SoCs
@@mod4rchive not the new Samsung OS’s, it’s filled with ads and a very clunky ui
@@mod4rchive As someone who has a circa 2009 Samsung TV, if they're one of the best, then all the rest must be the worst garbage in town. Even when it was brand new it was slow and hyper annoying. Especially when bad signal caused it to lockup, sometimes until you pull the power cord.
Of of the manufacturers--I want to say TCL--was very up-front about the fact that it actually costs more these days to sell a "dumb" TV than a Smart TV, because the latter will be subsidized by the expected user data collection revenue.
That is to say, these is zero incentive for anyone to make an open OS TV, as it would be even more expensive to cater to the (sadly) extremely niche audience of folks who want smart devices but care about privacy or moddability.
They will not allow it because you will keep using it and won't buy new TVs.
When we were up for our last TV purchase I was blown away that there are no "dumb" TVs available anymore. It's almost like these companies are selling our usage data and greed is making their decisions for them. /s
Thanks for the intro to this concept. I think this is pretty cool stuff and I like the concept of knowing what code is running on equipment that I own.
Selfishly, I actually kinda like it. The prices are heavily subsidized by companies like Netflix and Amazon who pay the manufacturers for including dedicated buttons on the remotes and selling them usage data, so I get it much cheaper and then I just connect it to my HTPC and never use any of that crap (hell, I don't even connect the TV to the Internet).
Just have to make sure the TV doesn't also have an always-on microphone or camera!
@@JeffGeerling 1984 was a manual for some of these TVs
@@hellterminator I thought a similar approach would work well for us until the built-in "smart" software started crashing regularly. It's frustrating to have a TV that works fine as a display but keeps being kneecapped by the computer inside it. The dedicated buttons on the remote are annoying as any accidental press will exit the input it was on. It also doesn't help that those dedicated buttons take up a majority of the remote faceplate, increasing odds they will be accidentally pressed. Almost like it is intentional...
Own nothing and like it? No thanks, not for me.
@@gannas42 Well, that sucks. My TV doesn't crash. And I don't even use the remote - the only thing I need the TV to do is turn on and off and my HTPC handles that through CEC.
The reason that you can use your remote is its using a CEC module to talk to the Pi. is a communications protocol built into the HDMI standard allowing CEC-enabled HDMI devices to exchange information and send/receive control messages.
I didn't know that, it's handy to know going forward.
2:20 made me lol
"Not all of these displays run on a Pi" and shows BSOD. Well played.
This aged very well.
Just FYI: the Pi 4 can definitely play back 4K videos, but they have to be encoded in h.265/HEVC for it to work.
huh, but h.265 is more cpu intensive than h.264
@@arjix8738 I believe the Pi 4 has better hardware support for decoding h265
@@arjix8738Not with hardware decoding it isn't.
@@Pocket-Calculator well duh, hardware decoding means that the GPU is doing the decoding
@@arjix8738 The Raspberry Pi usually have specific components to decode video. That allows it to decode high resolution video and also use less power than it would it it was decoding via CPU.
NEC displays have been my go to choice for business applications. I always get arguments from people complaining that they are too expensive. They see the prices of TVs at Best Buy and Costco and think, "What's the difference?" I always explain that the commercial displays are built for commercial applications, they are but to last and be on for long periods of time. Furthermore, consumer TV warranties often do not cover the TV when installed outside of someone's house. I don't need or want a SmartTV with a Netflix button on the remote in a conference room. I want a large display, not a large TV. Great video, I'm going to show this to people who challenge me on why I spec a commercial display in the future.
One of the departure boards in stanstead airport had a big raspberry pi logo on it a couple months ago, that was funny
You know what the best part about these is. My school has a lot of these hanging everywhere. I realised it as soon as they crashed. They do that a lot and the school is to lazy to reboot them.
I wish we could still buy "dumb" TVs, with no smart features, which could just have all their settings controlled by whatever media player box we're using.
I have 2. This video might be over my head and I just don't get it. I have a 50 inch dumb tv with a windows 7 PC and pi 3b hooked up. In my kitchen I have a 32 inch ( I am using it right now) with Nvidia Shield box. Both use keyboard and mouse, gamepads. So I just do not understand the hype for this monitor he is showing. Ok mine are not built in, but Velcro or build a bracket behind tv a connect with HDMI. What's the difference?
Both TV's are sceptre TV's. Both remotes work on eather tv
You could accomplish the same thing by simply not connecting your tv to the internet....
@@davefarley4318 a lot of money
@@davefarley4318 thats the catch lol, the only dumb tv nowadays are mediocre displays compared to the rest of the market (its a walmart brand afterall) and dont expect 99% of the actual good displays will come with smart functionality
A lot of these types of display run centralised signage software to control the layout and content.
You can usually define an area of the screen to pick up live video streams from the network, like multicast or RTSP.
Needless to say, there are Linux based, open source, signage projects like Xibo you can use, so if you have a machine with a TV tuner card, you could stream TV across your LAN to your non-TV signage display.
HD Homerun is excellent for this
A pc on a stick running Windows or Linux are plug and play, They work out to be cheaper than the time and hassle of using RPi stuff!
Yep, spent $13k on a display from them for a Hendrick dealership I worked at. Freaking amazing displays. Especially for outdoor use. Humidity didn't bother it, bright enough to display even with direct sunlight!
I had never imagined the TV of my dreams would also come with an RS-232 port! Time to break out the null modem cable!
2:07 I was tempted to buy one of these for like £50 from an e-waste recycler before. I would love to setup a giant touchscreen like that with Home Assistant in my home.
If you do this pls record uplod it to youtube
I would love to get ahold of one for my d&d group table.
Yeah I've seen the older ones go for 30€ here as well.
I did that, giant touch screen. Used enormous amounts of power, i got rid of it.
@@Away0G nice. How much?
I worked on the display Signage at DEN and am still good friends with the team that maintains them! Loved to see them make the Video!
Those things are great. We use them as information displays in our fire and rescue stations, where they show general information such as time, weather, tide and specialized info such as current ressource status or in case of an alarm a data overlay about the new mission, site, action type etc...
They're perfect for that. And maybe the world's most expensive Raspberry Pi magic mirror :D
These NECs are also used 24/7 in manufacturing on large production lines, displaying multiple statistics to operators and supervisors, allowing them to see at a glance during their process adjustments spec readings in real time without being tied down to a workstation monitor.
I thought it was going to be a chore to find a non-smart TV to replace the one that just died, but I wasn't expecting that I would be replacing it with a store display. This is fantastic news!
Be prepared to shell out a pretty penny though, they are really expensive...
Just get a smart TV and don't connect to the internet
@@gibbsfreenthalpy There were at least 3-4 options on the sitelink Jeff provided that were 4k resolution under $1000; when you consider that they should last at least 10 years and probably more, it's not that bad -- compared to giving up your freedom and advertising info + your TV is spying on you and using your internet bandwidth
@@kingneutron1 huh, ok, didn't see that, sry. I just roughly know the price we paid, and that was definitely more, even considering that we bought about 50-60 of them...
@@kingneutron1 How's it spying on you if you don't connect it to the internet? This whole concept seems a bit far fetched to me. In terms of value, you're way better off buying a smart TV, leaving it disconnected from the internet, and hooking up a HTPC or Raspberry Pi with internet access.
I picked up an ‘older’ NEC display to use with my streaming box. For being only 1080, it has amazing color accuracy, smooth motion and best of all, none of the clunkiness and unnecessary features of a smart TV.
I scored a used Panasonic commercial display recently for $35 (42") . works great and it's a
tank.
look at power consumption
It's almost jarring watching you do videos, and then see so much stuff from where I live. It's so rare to find a 'tuber that's in the area! I need to keep en eye out, maybe I'll bump into you on of these days!
Aging Wheels is near STL for another good channel. Now if only anyone was from KC
This thing is great! Aside these enterprise displays, we need non-smart TVs to make a comeback!
My last TV, I bought it based on the screen specs because I knew it would get outdated pretty fast. Also refurbished, pretty sure someone didn't like the lack of some smart features
Smaller again as well. A high quality picture in a small format is plenty in many cases. Just consider what most people used to watch this video.
Small world, I just bought my glasses from he lady at the @1:39 mark! I've been in to Pi's for a while now and just found your channel! See you at the Galleria one day!
Great timing on this! I have a few Pis running as dashboards for processes at work, simply refreshing an internal website every few minutes to get updated data. I'm planning on transitioning to something better where I could mix the page in with company announcements and other dashboards. I'd love to see a video about doing something like this with an open-source software.
Thanks for creating so many great videos!
The coolest use of displays I've seen in a store (and a mall store at that) was the Microsoft store(rip), where they had displays basically wrapping around the walls.
There was this furniture store we had, (we still have it) and it had a commercial that did really well. They had wraparound displays showing all of their commercials in one of their branches after that.
I especially enjoyed the clip from my favorite Star Trek movie. I'm watching it now. 😁
Oh hey, I have an older 1080p model of one of these! Recovered it from a long abandoned business location
It currently runs as my primary monitor on my desktop. This displays surprisingly good for just about damn near anything you could throw at it, I was surprised it even still worked when I found it lmao
Most companies will skip a commercial display, and go for a $300 residential display, and replace it every 2 years. We usually use Screenly. Been using it for years and years. The free version is call OSE.
Great video. I work in the signage industry and love these displays a lot and wish I could work with them more. But getting some small shop to actually buy them at this price, instead of the cheapest TV at Best Buy and then just using a FireTV stick, is very difficult. Signage has a lot of options and most go with the cheapest solution. I'm in SoCal and when I go through McD's drive through around the area, I see that the "TVs" the chose to use are failing big time. So if McD's can't even afford to install these, then Joe's sunglass hut probably won't either :)
Yeah; I have noticed some places cheap out, and within months, the TV is washed out or really, really dim (especially if they place it somewhere exposed to sunlight for part of the day).
And at that point, since they invested in the setup their using, they just go with it (since the dull image isn't as noticeable if you've just seen it every day a tiny bit less) and don't feel like they could switch to a proper display at some point :(
We had these at my previous job, and they didn’t actually last longer than off the shelf standard consumer TVs. They basically lasted a bit past their 3 year warranty and started having backlight issues. They were run 24/7 as signage displays and had plenty of airflow around them. Meanwhile, there are several consumer model TVs that preexisted my employment there (more than 5 years ago) that are run 24/7 for the same purpose (meeting room listings, and digital signage) that are still running today
This video is embedded on Sharp-NEC's SOC page for their signage. Congrats! Oh, and the Pi does have hardware h.265 (hevc) decoding and will do 4K fine, if you encoded it properly. If it doesn't, then Handbrake is your friend.
Shows a shot of the arch, mentions galleria....waaaait a minute. Hi neighbor!
This TV may be the only reliable source to buy a RPI these days :-)
lol
and... 😭
I don't know haha, but in Malaysia we have a very reliable official store that, i saw, has stocks that are available once a week, 10/20 of them once, but usually comes with package, that sucks, but sometimes i got the pi just with a $10 sd card,
It's name is Cytron Technologies
@@kreinova2747 Cytron's pretty cool - they've contacted me in the past, and they have some decent white-label parts too.
Back in 2009 I had to buy a new tv to replace my old CRT tv I'd had since 2003. Well I found a 50" flat panel tv from Sharp and decided it'd be a perfect replacement. At the time it cost me right around $1000. Get this, I still have that tv and it works beautifully! It's being used in my recording studio as a computer monitor, but also has Roku, a Blu-Ray player and a DVD player all hooked up to it. So I can watch movies, surf the web, record music, etc., etc. Sharp have always made some great electronics!
A "TV" with a serial port, the nostalgia!
awesome video! also, your ansible playbooks have been incredibly helpful over the years - just wanted to call that out lol
its great to see that raspberry pi integrations are now available for commercial use
interesting to see how many of them are already probably at use at stores, i have to keep an eye open next time im in a store so i can maybe spot one of those lol
Not that I'm interested in buying a "This is not a TV" the commentator sure makes me want one, he's concise and informative in the delivery of information 🤔 Great video, Jeff Geerling, maybe the best INFORMATIONAL video I've seen on UA-cam👌👍
how about DRM streaming services, I can't seem to get these to work on my linux desktop due to DRM (widevine L1) not being supported, I'm guessing it will be the same for pi based media centers? Lets say for amazon prime hd, can't get that one to work.
For consumer TV, you can buy demo units. 12 years ago, I bought a demo unit. It has one great feature: a glass panel in front of the screen!
I also suspect a better build, because it's still doing great in all aspect.
I also got it cheaper than the original product, because it was already used.
A friend who bought it with me didn't want in the first place, so I explained him that those TVs are made to be on display every day while the store is open, plus the glass pane that makes it sturdier.
I bought back my part a few years later. A bit expensive, but that TV was expensive and the price was still right.
I’ve been wondering if there’s anyone that makes just the display for awhile. This answers that. Dumb tvs are the future. Pick your own OS
I had two of these. Amazing when you understand that these are huge monitors/advertising exhibition displays. They're actually super nice and with heaps of connectors... Just no eArc ;)
It's funny you pointed out webOS as the proprietary operating system :) That's based on the open source webOS from Palm and HP years ago. LG still maintains the current repo. webOS OSE.
still got my hp touchpad (at least thats had more updates/life than my now defunct ipad3) with a gazillion updates/improvements on it and a pre3 collecting dust somewhere.
Samsung TVs use Tizen, which is also open source and actually backed by the Linux Foundation.
Hey Jeff, great video! Really enjoyed seeing RPis in use IRL! Super cool! Also, I wanted to say this video had a really high production value, which was cool! On the other hand I also enjoy the less produced stuff because it comes off as more you (like Red Shirt Jeff :) ). Either way, great video!
Sounds like the ultimate display for a Homelab Grafana display.
I still use a nec p702 from 2008 which ran forever. The quality of the components inside is impressive.
The serial port might seem odd, but RS-232 was the standard way of controlling displays and projectors before CEC came along, and continues to be used in the "pro" market. My projector has a serial port and it has been very useful in automating my home theatre.
Finally a tv that doesnt take almost if not all of your data. tbh, it shouldve always been that way. Nice to see that Sharp NEC prioritized on the essential first.
Me walking into random stores in the mall:
CAN I LOOK AT YOUR TVS JEFF TOLD ME TO SEE IF THEY HAVE PIES
Haha "Mall traffic was up 7% this month, but nobody bought anything, they were just looking at all our store displays."
That TV look alike is wicked smaht dude! 0:02
The screen image quality is bad, better to just buy a normal tv, then connect a pi via hdmi to it.
It's almost impossible to find non-"smart" TVs on the consumer market these days. The data tracking and advertising increase the profit margin.
@@pseudonym1515 Just leave the TV offline, it cant send data without internet.
Never would have thought!
Love the video... The only thing I might've missed is the price of this screen...
Check the links in the description-this model is somewhere around $1500 USD, so I didn't want to focus too much on price, since it's not something the average consumer would probably consider.
@@JeffGeerling I replied to another comment, if you go to the sitelink you provided and sort by price, once you get past the "contact us" junk there are at least 3-4 options for 4K resolution displays under $1k :)
This reminds me of my first flat tv was a $4000 commercial Panasonic 50 plasma with a similar blade system that allowed input upgrading I loved that tv!
I've said for a long time TV'S should use a standard input interface so the smart part can be upgraded
SCART?
Hello fellow St. Louisan! I have hooked PC's up to my televisions for years. I watched this video and am typing up this comment on a 720p plasma hooked up to an Core i5 HTPC. I also picked up one of those LG C1 OLED 55 inch TVs about 9 months ago. The picture is BEAUTIFUL. The built in speakers are no slouches either. I have it hooked up to a PC, but I did give the smart functions a try. They are actually quite good for what they are. I still prefer a PC hooked up to the TV though.
The Atom version of those compute modules should run Windows tho
Yeah, those setups are pretty good. I worked with older NEC screens, which were a part of some kiosk system which I had to repurpose in serveral of our offices. It had to be done cheap, so some PI's and a rescheduled screen did the trick. When we went into lockdown in 2020 I left the PI's on, when I returned a few months ago they were still running lol.
In the LUV shopping center in Lübeck (Schleswig-Holstein, Germany) there's one store that uses RPiOS with a program running on top to entertain the children whose parents are shopping. It doesn't even hide the mouse cursor!
Funnily enough one of the shops near my place has one, for the last few weeks its bugged out, so its displaying linux error codes, so i wondered if it had a pi inside or some other arm computer
Could also still be Intel, just running a Linux OS instead of Windows.
Love all this, definitely best type of TV. Pi is invented, designed and manufactured in west UK in Southern Wales. Amazing country to visit if you have the time. Beautiful place.
"Smarter than a Smart TV" oh gods no. What now, don't tell me they taught it to tell when I'm lying so it can interrogate me about brand preferences.
Edit: oh so it's actually just a big display that can make for an actually good TV that won't spy on me.
Sooo... after next time you're not Jeff Geerling? (TIC). Great video as always man. Love your work. Everytime I get bored and just play games and don't do tech I always get the will to tinker back after watching videos like this one.
Seems like a 4k (UA-cam) capable pi will be ideal. Eagerly waiting for a snapdragon gen 3 type soc, 8 6x2 or 4x4 big.little with a nice adreno 730 or mali g78. Gonna need a passive heatsink but hey, I'll take a price bump to $45 for 4gb at that point. I don't need my big gaming pc all the time, so doing responsive browsing on a pi would be ideal instead of the pi/laptop combo.
RPI’s or aka virtual machines have been used in this capacity for over 10 years from what i can remember. manufactures use them to display company information and or production information to the employees.
Amazing that you could upgrade this thing in the future without having to toss the whole TV for a new one,I have a fairly modern Quantum Dot TV and while its picture quality is fantastic, I often find its UI to be slow and laggy,Most likely because it has a slow processor :/
I already found a lot of displays running with Rasperry Pis, but often the Pi just is strapped with some zip ties to the wires that go into the display. Such hacky setups are quite popular.
And cheaper
btw: sharps remote worked out of the box because of hdmi cec :)
Ah... that would be obvious from the little message that popped up while I was booting the first time :P
It was CEC that allowed you to use the remote, not the gpios. It even showed on the screen right when you were mentioning the remote working.
4k is over-rated
LCD flat panels are overrated, CRT's with rpi 0w2's running OSMC all the way through!!! =D
The fact that this setup is insanely expensive and at least one of the parts are not available to your average person makes this really cool but extremely impractical.
Hey Jeff, where do you purchase your super cool t-shirts from? I’d really like to buy one of these NASA ones.
That signage OS actually looks really nice and polished
This is a couple major versions in-it's pretty darn stable, and worked as I expected (which is to say, way better than the terrible UIs I've worked with on all the consumer TVs I've ever used).
Pi's hardware still got some road before it can handle fully videos formats, clean 4k decoding etc...
2:40 is there another expansion slot to the right of the compute module?
If so what can you put in there?
iS there any advantage to using this display when I can get a better Samsung display for the same price and just plug a raspberry pi directly to the TV display port?
That 4:27 brought back ALLOT of memories... we are getting old
Ah, the height of UA-cam (IMO), the 2010-2014 era.
One of the hospitals i trained at had 10k NEC displays in the ORs, mostly to display laparascopic or robotic imagery, sometimes to display radiographic imaging. There were some ORs that had the hires displays displaying the patient chart, lmao... So not all of them were well utilized.
FWIW, "Smart" TVs can act as just a monitor, to which you plug any (actually smart) device. The LG C2 I got asked that at first boot, and I'll probably do that when I can buy something that can output 4K HDR for the living room. It does come with a Jellyfin client, though...
I used a 55 inch NEC display with an OPS module as my living room TV for a long time. The OPS module was beastly too, 6th Gen i7 and 16gb of RAM
Yodeck is my favorite cloud based display controller company. Based off Pi 4 units, and does do 4K. I bet it would work with this display very easily. Cheap too.
The ability to swap out the compute module, and the reliability would make it worth pay its cost, this is amazing.
I have heard they last about 3 years (coincidentally when the warranty ends) and then start having backlight issues, but some of the ones I saw installed in around 2014 are still going strong today,
We need displays like this available to the public. I haven't plugged an aerial into my TV in about 20 years, set top box (cable or satellite) provides the signal to HDMI. All I want is a decent screen and a ton of HDMI ports.
Same here, and I'd be okay paying a 10-20% premium on the exact same display if they just ripped out all the adware stuff and their custom 'smart apps'.
I agree with needing more hdmi ports. I was lectured awhile back, when mentioning that point. He almost sounded irate, telling me there are very few people that care if a TV only has 2 hdmi ports. My current TV has 4, and I still use an additional hdmi switch on one of the ports. Along with component connections, which you cannot find on a TV these days.
in the munic airport, they have some of the terminals with raspberry pi, once I saw one of them broken with the logo of the rpi...
Its always cool to compare the redundancy of commercial/ enterprise gear vs consumer products.
Was searching for this topic of video 2 weeks ago. glad i found this. Keen for more!
I'm a tinkerer at heart, but definitely a battle when choosing something customizable but straight forward at the same time.
I was originally looking at Google TV os, because of access to Android apps, but the profiles suck, the only thing the profiles do is separate the home suggestions, not your actual accounts in apps.
Nice to see a Missourian tech channel... Let's go!
that is so cool. especially that the board is removable so you can add newer ones later!
those colors in the thumbnail.... cant be a coincidence. is there something youre trying to tell us jeff?
I'd been curious about this for a while, thanks for scratching the itch!!!!!!!
These are also used in ORs for imaging too. So surgeons can share images and see done color perfect details.
No wonder no one can buy a raspberry pi, if every store, shop retailer has at least one raspberry pi running their displays, the manufacturers can not keep up.What a success for a little board designed to teach.
Very cool. Can’t wait to try this when Raspberry Pi’s become available.
Prague's buses have screens that show current and next 4 stations, as well as the direction and time. It is running on some crappy Celeron CPU, but they run Debian which is pretty cool. Seen them boot up early in the morning and one time a kernel panic during storm - I guess they don't have ECC memory lol.
This (apart from industrial build quality) is what i need. Just big screen, no tv receiver (I dont watch tv), I will "smartify" it myself better if need be.
The best part of this type of display is when it crashes.
I have been traveling by train for a long time, in the 00's / early 2010's you mostly saw windows based errors when they failed, but nowadays they don't fail as much.
When they do you see typical linux errors like a black screen with a xorg cursor or what I saw yesterday, one screen stuck at initramfs.
I work for a large screen manufacturer. We do large screens all day long. Anything from a single LCD to multi million dollar oversized LED walls.
It’s a fun business and lots of travel.
Someday I want to look into LED walls... how they're constructed, how they're run, the full process from start to finish. They're fascinating, especially in how well modern video walls appear on TV/film nowadays (in the past, projection-based displays would look terrible in recordings).
@@JeffGeerling I work with large format video walls since 1997. Cubes, LCD, LED and Projection. I developed software, hardware, install and service all of it... and more. It's my daily bread.
If you need some info... hit me up.
:-)