The Videowall

Jul 2018 - Aug 2021

Ahhh yes. The Videowall. This started in the summer going into 10th grade. It was my first summer job, and I was really excited to work at the Great Neck Public Schools TV Studio since it has really shaped who I am as a person. One day, these two huge boxes just arrived. And the next thing I knew, I was working with those two huge Samsung Digital Signage monitors for the next couple weeks.

The plan was to hang them up on the middle school hallway to play content across both screens. But even more so, the challenge was getting them to sync with each other so a movie could move across both screens, or be half-and-half, or any combination of fractions. Not only that, but we wanted to schedule content to play at certain times. So it was my job how to figure out how to get all this to work.

I thought it would be easy. But oh boy, far from easy it was. After hanging the monitors, I realized that I would need to connect to them within the school's network. Turns out, the school blocks all such connections. So away on the phone with IT I went.

Next was installing the software for the monitors — MagicInfo. This took DAYS to do, since I needed to install Bootcamp on a few Macs before I finally found one that would work (there were no PCs there and MagicInfo is only a PC app). Then, after installing, I realized I had installed the wrong version. Uninstalling and reinstalling did the trick.

After a week or so figuring all that out, it was time to figure out how to connect the screens to each other. We had numerous other firewall issues with this, and soon a licensing issue with the monitors as well, so I found myself on the phone with Samsung for hours for a few days straight. Finally though, everything was working! I then taught the other members of the TV studio how to actually work the thing.

School had started, and things went really well with the monitors…Until just a month later when the monitors disconnected. Back to the studio I went, calling Samsung again, and realized that I needed to update the software once more.

It was good for the year, but then broke again by the start of next summer. It didn't matter, because the studio had ordered TWO MORE huge monitors for me to add to the other two!! The installation wasn't hard, but it was extremely hard to actually make them sync. Hours on the phone with Samsung, another software update, another licensing issue later, and finally things were working again.

But it didn't stop there. Numerous issues happened again when the school changed their firewall system. Now I needed to work with IT again to make it work, which ended up breaking other stuff meaning I had to do a full uninstall and reinstall AGAIN!

Since then, it's been great, thankfully. Honestly, the software and hardware is pretty bad, but it did make for some very fun tinkering around. It was cool to learn all about undertaking such a project — one which looks simple but ends up having many issues.