Video Wall Systems for Control Rooms

What a video wall system actually consists of

A video wall is not a bigger monitor. It is four layers that have to be chosen together: the display panels, the mounting structure, the signal layer that decides what appears where, and the control surface the operator uses. Most disappointing video walls in service today went wrong at the third layer, not the first — the panels are fine and the signal path was never designed.

We supply the signal and control layers: the video integrated management platform, the decoding server cards, the network keyboards and the management software. Panels and mounting structures are specified per project and confirmed against the wall size, the room and the viewing distance.

Everything that can appear on the wall

• IP cameras directly, over ONVIF, RTSP or GB28181, without being routed through a recorder first.
• Recorder streams, including preview and recorded playback of the normal day-to-day footage.
• Analogue cameras through BNC encoders where an existing AHD, CVI or TVI installation has to be carried forward.
• Computer desktops, set-top boxes and media players as HDMI, VGA or encoded network signals.
• A single camera full screen, a four-way view, or a 36-way mosaic on one card.

Why modular rather than a fixed box

A modular chassis lets the wall grow with the site. Each card carries its own decoding capacity and its own outputs, so a wall that starts as 2×2 and expands to 4×4 over three years needs more cards rather than a new controller. On a multi-phase building project that is the difference between extending a system and replacing it.

It also isolates faults. A card that fails takes its own outputs down and leaves the rest of the wall running, which matters when the wall is the thing people watch during an incident.

Design decisions that decide whether it is useful

The first question is not how many screens but how many streams one operator can actually watch. A four-panel wall showing four large views is more useful than a sixteen-panel wall showing sixteen feeds nobody reads. Design the layout around the operator's task, then size the panels.

The second question is what should never be off the wall. Gates, the main entrance and the loading dock usually earn a permanent window; everything else rotates. That decision is what determines how many decoder cards you need, and it is cheaper to make it before the order than after.

From source to screen

The wall is the last metre of a chain that starts at the camera. The decoding server turns streams into pictures, and the layout decides how many of those pictures an operator can actually read at once.