sad to say I'm giving up

[Kevin McGurn]

After spending about a month testing and trying to get Piwall to do what I wanted, I sadly admit that I am giving up.  I bought 3 43" TVs and hung them in Portrait 2 inches apart to eventually simulate a view from 3 windows on a wall in my kitchen.  I bought Pi 3Bs to power them.

After following some updated instructions found on this forum I was able to get Piwall running using an older OS version.  I was very happy that I was able to split one big video over 3 TVs.

The bad news was that when made my large video 1920x1080p, the player on every Pi would quit in a few seconds.  The best resolution I could use for the big video was 1280x720.   Unfortunately, that means each 43 TV is displaying at 360x640.  So pretty much it's a mobile phone resolution stretched over a 43" screen.  This looked pretty good from 15 feet away but I work within a few feet of the wall so I could see the compression artifacts clearly.

It looked like if I really wanted a 4k video split into 3 screens my choice was to buy a more commercial grade box that would cost around $2k.  I'd love to play with that and see what it looks like but that price was more than i wanted to spend.

I returned the 3 displays and bought single 70" 4k display which is only an inch or 2 smaller than the 3 displays combined.  I am very happy with showing views from around the world in 4k on a single TV with just one cable hanging from it.  I admit that the 3 display view had its charm.  I loved looking at it.  But only being able to use a 1280x720 video as the source wasn't good enough for me.

Thanks so much for your support suggestions in the forum.  I would have never gotten as far as I did without you all.  Piwall is a brilliant product and I wish I could have gotten it to do what I wanted.

Kevin

[Kevin McGurn]