Navori Debuts “Insane” Capability To Drive 16 Different Signals To 16 HD Screens Off One Player

December 17, 2018 by Dave Haynes

The Swiss software firm Navori will be showing some new in-house technology at ISE that it says gets an “insane” amount of display performance out of a single playback box.

The Swiss as people aren’t typically known for hyping the hell out of things, so Navori’s marketers must be dead-serious when they take an internal name like Insane Performance Rendering, or IPR, and productize it. Navori says IPR makes it uniquely possible to drive 8K video walls or four clusters of 4K digital signage displays from a single media player, resulting in dramatic cost-savings for systems integrators and end users.

The IPR tech is based on Navori’s 64-bit player software and optimized PC hardware. IPR can drive a signal across as many as 16 full HD displays, from a single device.

Navori also says IPR only uses 20 percent of the CPU when displaying 8K content due to its highly efficient use of processing power. Furthermore, IPR can frame-accurately synchronize with any content type, including HTML5 and tickers, since the entire workflow is centralized on one workstation.

“IPR is a breakthrough technology for delivering content resolution of this magnitude from a single PC,” says Jerome Moeri, CEO, Navori. “Systems integrators save on hardware, software licensing and labor through a reduced installation footprint, and a technology that is simple to configure and maintain compared to a filled server cabinet.”

Moeri expects that IPR will be of particular interest to retail businesses and restaurants. For example, IPR’s high-performance rendering will offer benefits for quick-service restaurants and entertainment venues that want to drive multiple menu boards and concessions. In retail, video walls in shopping windows can have four tiled 4K screens – with brilliantly crisp visuals – off a single IPR-driven player. The same benefits apply to video wall installations in corporate and hospitality environments.

The counter-argument that’s going to come up is that this arrangement puts all the digital signage eggs in one basket, so to speak. If the player fails, for whatever reason, it’s not just one menu in a QSR that’s down, it’s all of them. My guess is a smart integrator, if they were going down this path, would have a redundant player and some sort of fail-over capacity, so that if one display signal is lost it rolls over to the other one automatically, so the menus are never dark.

A full row of darkened menu screens would be a nightmare for a QSR operator.

Navori is also introducing new rules-based contextual content triggering capabilities within its QL2 CMS. These capabilities, says the press release, will offer more flexibility in dynamic content delivery, versus making best-guesses about what content makes sense days or even weeks in advance, when scheduling.

Navori is at Stand 8-E195 at ISE.

  1. Tony Scott says:

    This is interesting but only a natural extension of what some of us have been doing for many years. We have installations that drive up to 16 screens using one machine with multi-head graphics cards such as Matrox ones. Each screen can be driven as a completely independant channel from our player software or in various combinations of screens.

    An good point about the potential for problems with menu board systems using this approach. We have some installations now heading for 10 years continuous 7 day use driving domestic TVs using 4 head cards. Of these the failure rate has been less than 1% per year.

    A new client a few years ago was concerned about this approach and invested in a complete duplicate player machine as fail-over. Each machine ran continuously and the 8 screens in the menu board screen had input from both machines although at one time only one was active. We monitored each player automatically as well as each screen. If a player stopped running the system automatically switched to the other one. If a screen was detected as failing the system automatically applied some business rules to reconfigure the remaining screens to run a revised version of the menu. This could function down to supporting only 4 live screens.

    All the time the user help desk was advised of the action take so they could take appropriate action. Interestingly after running for 2 years the system had never needed to fail-over and so the client simply bought single machines for the rest of their rollout.

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