I've been informed that the super early Atoms (this is one of the first) were *not* fully SoCified yet and still required a chipset, so the ION probably is performing north/southbridge functions. Also, by the time this was made, XP was no longer being offered for new machines, so the embedded version was probably the only viable option. Also, thanks to some viewers I HAVE ordered a cheap aliexpress breakout board for powering up my OPS units, but I'm still looking for an OPS enabled TV! Ideally 42" or smaller, and preferably with the touch functionality, but if you have *anything* and are in the greater pacific northwest, please get in touch - cathoderaydude at gmail. Thanks!
I have an idea that might help you get a display. I used to intern at a New York public school, EVERY classroom had a Smartboard. And thanks to you I now know what the included OPS means. This might be a shot in the dark but if you contact your local DoE they might have discontinued equipment to sell off lease including a Smartboard.
ION in similar designs is used not just as a chipset but also for hardware decode acceleration which wasn't good at all on atom certified chipset from intel.
@@MatteoSaitta oh! That makes a ton of sense! I had read that the ion had video decoding silicon but it completely missed me that it would be important here, you're absolutely right.
Just wanted to say that I appreciate the “pop” noise that accompanies additional text added in post. I don’t always have my eyes focused on the screen 100% of the time during these videos, so the pop helps give me an audio cue that there’s something new on the screen I should be paying attention to read. I know it’s a few extra steps in editing but it is really appreciated and good like… vidsmithship. Thanks!
A friend of mine runs a drycleaner and years ago he was lamenting having to pay through the butt for his signage guy to update some system. Chromecasts had just come out and I suggested he try one for a small fraction of the cost and set his promos as a screensaver. Months later he said the biggest problem was avoiding casting soccer games to it while he was working and getting distracted.
I have also used a Chromecast (that I got for free with TH-cam TV years back) as digital signage for a budget gym that needed my help, and the "remote management" of just adding JPEGs to a Google Photos album as well as the clock on-screen made it actually look and work nicely for them. Never found anything easier that also looked good on-screen (the Amazon players are just a 720p cutbus for JPEGs).
@@CathodeRayDude sometimes it's just TOO in your face! In your fake presentation I automatically assumed LG was little guy 😂 I forgot the device was made by LG!
The SSD form factor used by this little guy (with the 4 mounting screws) was developed by the SFF Committee and was adopted as an industry standard in 2009 by JEDEC as MO-297. JEDEC refers to it as “Slim Lite SSD Assembly” but industry almost universally uses “half slim” branding instead. Apacer has a “Sata Disk Modules” line of products which pre-date the standard that are offered in about a dozen ad-hoc/non-standard form factors and are still being made. As far as I can find Apacer has only ever used the “half slim” branding for standards compatible ssds. The non-standard modules being described as “half slim” are listing errors by resellers.
I had an Acer Chromebook that used this kind of SSD, even though there was room for a full-sized laptop drive. This was way back in the early days, probably first or second generation.
@@CathodeRayDude You probably have a bunch of these modules already and don't even know it. Most lower capacity 2.5in SSDs are actually small modules like this in an oversized shell. Some (Crucial BX500 and Lexar NS100 at least) are this exact half slim form factor, while others have slightly different footprints and mounting holes.
I cracked open one of those cheap WD green SATA SSDs and it had the same form factor PCB inside. Became handy to upgrade an ancient win7 tablet to more than 16GB storage...
I'm absolutely the sort of nerd who is entertained by knowledge I will never have any use for, which is why I'm so glad you're doing this series. Each episode is like a comfy little adventure into a world I didn't know existed.
Comfy little adventure? Couldn't be me, I'm here for the discourse. I watch these kinds of videos with a bucket of popcorn, kicking my feet girlishly as the person behind the camera calls the designers and electrical engineers horrible names for the way they laid out their PCB traces, and I enjoy every second of it. /j /lh
I think you hit the nail on the head as to why LG didn't or couldn't "trim down" the OS. I've worked with XP Embedded, WES 2009, Windows Embedded Standard 7, and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2019 (Microsoft sucks at naming things, Xbox anyone?), and while it is possible to remove individual OS components, doing so often removes seemingly unrelated functionality elsewhere in the OS. These dependencies are often not properly documented, so they are only discovered during testing when something does not work. To make a Windows Embedded image as flexible as possible, it's often less hassle to not get too aggressive with the component trimming.
I'm cashier at gas station in Poland. We are still usin win7emb. It just as solid as XP, also with literally no replacement. I think management went with win7 due to security... on LAN... :D
Bingo, you beat me to it. In particular, removing WMP breaks all sorts of ActiveX controls that you wouldn't think have anything to do with WMP. Usually it's because the control is capable of producing audio, and it'll freak out if it can't find WMP's codecs. This is particularly fun when you're working with industrial panel PCs running XPe that don't even have a speaker, but still crash when their HMI/SCADA/SPC software tries to load a charting or alarming control. That ~20MB saved on the install turns into hours of labour per end user to troubleshoot and work around it.
And the reason to use Embedded rather than the full version of the OS is that Embedded was cheaper, so it made sense to use it even if you didn't strip anything out of it.
Also makes me wonder if the PoC engineer was trying to cut down the install size with trial and error, and boss came along and said "stop spending time on this, we'll upgrade from 512mb"
@@ChrisHarringtonMinneapolis No, because up-front labor is amortized on per-unit costs unlike storage. I think Ed got it right here -- the costs saved aren't worth the future compatibility issues with dependency charts that look like an Arkansas family tree. hehe ;-)
"Either you're a giant nerd, or ... I don't know what you're doing on my channel." Imagine calling out your entire audience 🙃 Ah man, I guess my second comment got caught in the spam filter. Not sure if you can find it but there are definitely ways to power up those OPS PCs. The original comment had some search terms for you.
all this time consumers "smart tvs" could've had replaceable upgradable modules, the last smart tv by LG we used the wifi died, then the ethernet, then the OS would randomly complain about no space and lock up requring a factory reset, supposidly the claims where bad memory leaks due to their outsourced webos that was never fixed for tvs 3-5years old, the sheer volume of tvs out there that would otherwise be perfectly funtional if not for bloatware should be a crime.
so funnily enough Samsung had the same idea and sold smart TVs with an upgrade slot... for like one model year AFAIK. I don't even remember if it was a line-wide thing or just one of those things they put on flagship TVs to make the flagship seem less of a waste of money.
WebOS was never intended for TVs (it's a tablet/phone OS after all), and when HP was handling it years back, it was massively underfunded and buggy as hell. And I was thinking LG would do something about it (there are bugs from like 2011 that were never fixed) but it looks like they never did. Memory leaks were common problem on Palm Pre, on which the whole system originated!
A major pet peeve of mine, I want my TV to just be... a display. either for a console or my full fledged HTPC. having a socketed module would just be another input device. were all used to pushing the Input button, and selecting HDMI1, AV2, DTV, etc etc. It would be simple to have SmartTV as one of the inputs. but no, plugging the TV in requires me to wait 2 minutes whilst it boots android. and then complain that it does not have wifi. or if you pick up the remote wrong, it drops whatever your doing and tries to load netflix. If I could choose what module I jack into the SmartTV slot, I would absolutely use it. Id thought that waay before this video, but now I know its a known standard... im a bit peeved. I would totally buy a MiSTer module. how cool would that be?
We have an LG smart tv and webOS is so annoying, especially since it doesn't support Android apps (I wish I could have Kodi on the only 4K TV we have at home) and NOT EVEN ChromeCast, only Apple AirPlay... So for me the only option to stream my local media is to install the shitty bloated LG smart home app, which needs an LG account to even work, and then wait forever until the app loads all the recent media on my phone (since just using Android's native file selector would have been to easy) and guessing what video I actually want to play, because the file selector only shows thumbnail and time stamp. Tbh even my old Toshiba 1080p "dumb" TV with an Android TV stick is sooo much more convenient
In the that era, the RAM depended on the chipset. 945 G/GZ/GM supports 4GB of maximum memory and 945GC supports only 2GB. I believe the Ion is also 4GB of RAM. The Ion is a GeForce 9400 M G but it's also the memory controller. The Ion could be DDR2 or DDR3. It also handles the PCIe lanes and SATA and stuff like that, and I believe it supports RAID 0 and 1.
There is another part to the story and that is Intel doesn't go back and revalidate old platforms when new higher capacitiy ram chips are made 6th gen (maybe 7th gen idk) are quite happy to support 128gb of RAM, but 32gb ddr4 udimms only came out in the 9th gen (They did go back and validate on 8th gen apparently)
I still remember when 775 was quite common. At least in my friends computers. I was checking memory compatibility, max ram etc... And it never was true. I remember gigabyte 775 mobo "Supports up to 4gb of ddr2" was working fine with 8gb, with c2d 😂 (early days of modded minecraft, that sh... needed A LOT). Also there was something similar on AMD platforms too. Still owning a C2Q with 8G that serves sometimes as a minecraft server :D
@@carmonben Correct, Intel does not go back and re-validate memory maximums. The Alder Lake N series chips for example will list 16GB of RAM as the max. But, that is because when they launched, that was pretty much as much DDR5 as you could get in a single SODIMM. Nowadays you can just slab a 32GB stick in there and it'll work.
yea theres no reason it would be limited to 4 or 8 gb when 32gb is supported on these chipsets and socket 775. you still have to enable /pae /4gb in sys ini or windows configuration utility. windows also doesnt automatically enable dual / quad channel ram either. not for these boards if i recall
The TVs we use for digital signs where I work are definitely not ordinary televisions. They are commercial models, designed to run for years without interruption. So far, out of 180 displays we have had deployed for the past 4 years, we have not had to replace one yet, though several of the little guys attached to them (which run android and are scheduled, tracked, and managed remotely by a contracted service provider) have had to be replaced. I suspect LGs primary purpose in building the large breakout box for the NC2000 was for if you had an existing TV that didn't have the built in PC slot.
@@bend8353 It's an adapter that plugs into your HDMI and turns the data into water. It's useful if you want to do gardening but only have a game console at hand
I'm glad you finally mentioned bright sign; when I worked for a company that rhymes with San Francisco I installed their system of signage in a building which were just rebadged versions of the high end bright signs. They were centrally managed and could do things you could only dream of with a normal PC. They were pulling in a multicast TV stream on most TVs, but we had a video wall with 9 of them and they supported video walling natively. They could also send IR and serial commands natively which we used to turn the TVs off and on on a schedule. Edit: wasn't expecting this to be capable of video walls. I suspect the only reason to do it with multiple instead of using a video wall controller is that the displays can run at their native resolution whereas a video wall controller would be limited to 1080/4k
This a tip for you single handley helping solve a problem at my work with this video! Once I saw the mention about the brightsign boxes, my eyes lit up! We've been looking for a way to have video/imagery looping on TV's in our stores without having to manage locally! Once I realized all the other stuff it could do, I ordered it right away. In the process of deploying more as we speak
The OPS segment made me realise why the “television screens” displaying information in my local A&E had bright red stickers proclaiming “THIS IS NOT A TV”: They were just big fuck-off LCD displays with OPS computer modules installed!
Either OPS or an embedded proc; a lot of these things nowadays have a fully integrated Android gadget running a custom software stack specifically for signage, and yeah, no tuner!
I'm given to understand that most signage grade displays not only lack a tuner they have cut back as far as they can on image processing -- there's no motion compensation or other nice things.
"JPG to HDMI Converter" made me laugh. For a slightly creepy example of a more sophisticated digital signage network that must have some smarts behind it: when Prince Philip died in the UK every single digital advertising board on major roads changed to an image of him announcing the death. Assume one company was responsible for most of those billboards and just decided to do it but it was a bit weird all the same. Must have been thousands of billboards that all changed at once so presumably the ad server they talk to started to simply serve up that one image. I guess maybe it happened when queenie croaked too but I can't confirm, didn't see it. Was too busy trying to get out of the country.
Global (who also do Radio), Clearsign and Elonex are three of the bigger ones here in the UK. But when you have networks of thousands of signs, hopefully you have a protocol for major events.
@@monad_tcp no law for digital signage, but the BBC is obligated to interrupt broadcasting to cover major events/incidents, and other broadcasters are "strongly advised" to interrupt (though they are not required to actually cover the incident like the BBC are - those broadcasters can simply terminate programming, as many broadcasters did when the queen died). as another reply pointed out: Global are one of the big names in digital signage, and they also have a pretty expansive radio network. it would make sense if Global took advantage of the heads-up they get as a news outlet to also take over signs they owned and announce the news too (news stations receive advance warning of major broadcast messages, particularly notable deaths, before it's put to air). no idea if clearsign or elonex have similar industrial ties to news.
VGA can get by with between 6 and 10 wires depending on the monitor - 10 gives you RGB, Hsync, and VSync, and a ground for each, but some VGA monitors will accept composite sync for 8 wires, and some can use sync on green which leaves you 6. All the other wires are for stuff like EDID, I2C, etc.
I am one of the guys using the OPS ATSC module! My specific flavor of brain damage includes "Good TVs are expensive but barely used signage displays are not" and that's culminated in rocking a $50 "Used for CES" NEC V552 for the last ~4 years as the living room TV. 1080p AHVA with 16.7M color panel.
29:49 Nearly all big Fastfood restaurants here in germany have this, they have about 4-5 screens above the counter and they display the menu there, but at some time all displays will start playing a big video (for example for a new burger) at the same time, really looks impressive when they do this... and I saw one screen was "crashed" because there was no boot-device available but the other displays still played the big video at the same time, so they seem to use a PC for EVERY display!
Yes. Even using compute modules would be good. Or I guess whatever the smallest, cheapest computers are that you can still easily connect to a hard drive or SSD.
Never gonna happen, wouldn't be a good idea either. The Image processing in TV's is optimised on a model by model (to some extent unit by unit) basis, this is especially important in the age of HDR where TV's are expected to adjust & roll-off the PQ curve & colour gamut to within the spec of that specific TV. Monitors need basic processing done for them by the PC but highend HDR monitors are doing increasingly more processing on the monitor itself. Switching to OPS would not only require a lot more calibration than your average consumer is comfortable with (in my experience most are to scared to even change the picture mode) but even with that you'll never get the results of an image processor optimized for that panel. And when consumers are looking at TV's side by side in a showroom (not something you do with monitors) the minuta of picture quality really matters. The current system makes alot more sense. Have a built in SoC with software designed for that model. Include a Smart OS as you need the SoC anyway so why force customers to buy another media device. And if customers don't like the built in option they can choose from a wide variety of Smart boxes on the market whilst maintaining the built in image processing no matter what device they use, a win win. So as you can already connect a variety of smart devices, OPS would just overcomplicate the situation & add many more problems than it solves. If you hate your TV's OS that much just buy an Apple TV, Nvidia Shield or build your own Media PC. We don't need to change the entire TV ecosystem to get the advantage of choice.
@@MsMarco6I agree it's never gonna happen, but not for the reasons mentioned. I suggest it's neve gonna happen because most people are fine with having ads choked down their gullet and a lifetime of 2 years casual use, if their TV is 500 instead of 2k dollars. The signage PCs are usually color-matched quite well out of the factory, because many of those will be used in a mosaic application next to its brothers. They're also quite a lot more reliable, because they're expected to work 16 to 24 h a day, every day, for the duration of the service contract, and at brightnesses visible in well-lit rooms. Frankly, I'd be willing to pay some premium for a TV that was basically a monitor. I don't watch TV. The inbuilt OSes are invariably slow as molasses and out of support in 3 years. Appliances have a long history of expected lifetimes of 10+ years, but TVs have strayed from that.
@@MsMarco6 you entirely misunderstood the point, and also the distinction between 'monitor' and 'tv'. Removing 'smart' features doesn't mean removing the image processing hardware. A 'dumb' TV can still have DSPs, configuration/calibration presets etc. That isn't what the 'smart' in 'smart TVs' means. Furthermore, modularity can be achieved without sacrificing convenience. I'm under no illusions about how the nature of business and human greed makes my desire unlikely. I'm talking in ideals, as indicated by the word "wished". Begone with your obstinate pessimism, your misery is irrational and unwarranted.
@@MsMarco6the problem with smart tvs is that even when you use it as a dumb tv it still negatively effects the experience by being slow or injecting ads
i *think* you can get away with only 6 conductors for VGA my evidence for this? the most electrically cursed dongle in my collection is a passive DE-15 to USB mini-B, carrying the standard RGB, H-sync, and V-sync over the 5 signal wires, and using the cable shield and mini-B shroud for GND
I knew what it was immediately, as I worked with digital sign, POS machines, and firewall development. Most people will never see one of these devices not attached to the back of a screen or under a sales counter somewhere, I got to see them on my workbench, sometimes in pieces. The layout is intended to be as compact as possible, the recessed USB port is probably for a license dongle that unlocks whatever software the vendor put on it - often times it must be in that specific USB port. They can often be converted to a normal PC running normal software relatively easily, but they tend not to be very powerful, because they are built more for reliability and compactness than for speed of operation.
So going a little deeper than just “Hey, the early Atoms were just CPUs and not SOCs”, the Ion chipset was originally supposed to be paired with the Atom processors (in direct competition with AMD’s low-powered CPU and IGP solution of the time). Then people figured out they worked with the Core 2 processors. You should be able to install OS X 10.6 on this machine.
Speaking of commercial equipment, if there is a closing Rue21 near you they are selling their equipment from the back of the store. I bought their music player, something called a "Playnetwork MC500" for $12. Looks like its just a boring little intel box but I guess ill find out at the end of the month when the store actually closes and I can go pick it up! Also got a rack UPS and PDU for $12 each. No digital signage controllers at my location unfortunately.
I always wonder how far into the video I’ll go before I point at the screen and shout. Today it was 00:05:25. THAT’S A BRIGHTSIGN! FWIW, we’ve kicked Brightsign to the curb around here. They’re overly complicated and somewhat unreliable compared to competitors who are now taking Brightsign’s lunch. Last week lecture capture machines. This week digital signage! It’s like you’re slowly discovering the existence of entire verticals in which I am entrenched. Next week… streaming appliances, maybe? I’ve got a pretty sweet one sitting by my desk that we retired a couple of years back… It’s too cool to send to the e-waste pile in the sky.
I have looked into streaming appliances a *little* bit - generally speaking they seem too simplistic (or too dependent on cloud services I don't have a subscription to) to cover in a video, but maybe I'm wrong. What's the deets on the one you have?
We’re moving from a collection of different systems to Vitec. Brightsign only really works for our screens that never change. I couldn’t get the marketing department to understand the Brightsign backend and teaching 20 odd non technical staff how to schedule 200 screens with it was nightmare fuel.
It's funny because the DS company I work for specifically poaches from BS clients and similar because they find those systems too complex for non-technical people, smaller businesses, etc. We sell them on cheaper devices with a dumbed-down management platform that even a marketing person can handle and our clients eat it up.
@@Number1Void Indeed. I had a client who's experience with BrightSign was so spectacularly bad (specified by a different consultant, and a big part of the reason that consultant was "invited" to leave the premises with a police escort) that they told me, despite a near 20 year relationship with them, if I even thought of specifying BS in one of their projects I wouldn't be welcome back either. Which Vitec platform are you using? I'm not convinced that EasyTV is nearly the panacea their sales people make it out to be, but at least so far the experience has been better than BS. (Though also it's primarily IPTV/VOD with a side of Digital Signage)
This is my favorite tech series on TH-cam at the moment. I have always been fascinated with Mini PCs in all varieties! I have a little ThinkCentre M600 Tiny sitting behind my TV (for *cough*legal*cough* emulation) and used an absurd amount of white label Mini PCs as routers, access points, you name it, and they're always so interestingly designed. Even still I've never seen or heard of any of the featured devices and the detail you go into about them really sates my curiosity! Thanks Dude.
Those thinkcentre tinies are *so great*, especially since with the dock-displays IBM has they are about as close to this sort of specific embed-in-display form factor as makes sense for a household user. my wife currently has an aging (but sufficiently capable for ordinary tasks) HP AIO and I've considered getting such a setup to make things easier on her. For such small devices, they're fairly easy to get into and modify the hardware (add RAM or storage, replace CPU, etc.)
Would be cool to do a fundraising stream to buy a display if one doesn’t magically show up locally. You might ask the event coordinators at local convention centers what happens when they retire their old displays. I help run a conference in Michigan, and it seems like our venue is changing / upgrading digital signage pretty frequently. Have to imagine they go somewhere. Here in Seattle, I’m surprised they’ve never shown up at RePC.
So there's a few issues wrt ordering one. For one thing, I don't trust any seller to know how to pack a TV, so it could arrive smashed; don't want to be in that situation. Also, all the ones I can find for sale (that aren't brand new and over $4k) are enormous; I have no room for another 65" TV anywhere. And one HAS shown up at REPC (4, actually) but the image quality is awful. I could get it for probably $150, but it's once again a 65" or 75" set that I have no use for other than a demonstration. I'd much prefer to get a 32" or 40" set that I can afford to keep around and use, so that's what I'm hoping for.
@@CathodeRayDude running out of space to put your stuff is horrible. I'm facing a similar problem right now where a big chunk of my home lab has spilled out of my office and into the dining room along the wall. Wife isn't too happy, so I guess I'm going to have to look into adding on to my office.
I love this series. I really like the industrial PCs, and how they're designed, and the extreme flexibility you have with them. Not to mention the "tinkering" aspect when you see a unpopulated connector. Please more!
I thought that the purple brightside looked familiar, then I realised that it had the same purple that Roku uses for their brand colour. Turns out Roku manufactured it.
30:25 I can speak to this, sign companies will sell you anything, will install anything, and won't tell you that it can be done with a raspberry pi and a web server. And most companies don't have people in charge of signage that knows better: "That's just what it costs, don't like it, don't have a sign."
I disagree, the ease and power of a commercial system is why a client is willing to pay more. I have installed numerous BrightSign units for clients and they run flawlessly for years, some have been in museum displays for over a decade.
It depends on how reliable your system has to be. For example to show a dynamic webpage without disconnecting from the internet and killing the SD card or the Raspberry Pi is not an easy task. FullPageOS helps a lot with that, but it has its quirks.
Quite a lot of the time in business you're not paying for the solution itself, you're paying for something to be someone else's problem. At the mid scale, in between "there's five of us total, we all do everything" and "there's an in-house department for that", there's a lot to be said for sticking to your core competencies and outsourcing the rest of what you need to do to other businesses for whom that thing is their core competency. Say you've rolled your own solution with a raspberry pis and a web server, it runs all the menu displays in your small chain of burger joints. One day every display in your entire company breaks. You have no idea why. Suddenly your entire IT team (all three of them) is in crisis mode troubleshooting, potentially for days. What happens if a cash register breaks in the meantime? Who handles day to day support while this is going on? On the other hand if you outsourced your signage and your contract has an SLA, you call your signage company, they fix it, if they can't fix it they come in and replace everything with a known-working system, which they have in stock, because they're a signage company. If they can't even do that, they pay you the compensation specified in the contract for breaching their SLA. At no point is it your problem to solve. That's worth a lot of money.
The little nuances of the details you find in these computers I find quite entertaining as well as intriguing as I know most people would brush past them, even some IT guys I know. Great video sir! Love the adventure of detail you bring to your videos!
That they ran a GPU 24/7 without a heatsink or any cooling at all, just the bare chip, for *9 years,* might be one of the craziest things I've ever seen on this channel.
The advantage of Windows embedded was cost. When we were shipping XP embedded on our product, our unit cost was $100 per unit, compared to many hundreds more for other versions. ;)
Thank you for documenting the OPS plug and introducing me to it. We've got some giant touch signage made by a company called Display10 and it needs new compute modules to upgrade us to windows 11. Turns out they're OPS modules and now I have a way to upgrade them!
The fact this one has "dedicated" graphics of some reasonable kind makes me want one, so I made an offer for one on eBay. It also looks rather nice! You are single handedly the source of about 10 purchases I have made on eBay.
Yes, I did wind up getting it for the low-ball offer I made, and if you want to feel even more vindicated, mine came in it's original shipping container (serials match) and it was originally addressed to a McDonald's restaurant. So yes, it probably did display burger prices on a TV.
while being a chipset and a graphics chip the main function of nvidia ion was switching between its graphics and the integrated intel graphics, to the point some machines only use that function leaving the chipset functionality unconnected. at least one reviewer called it a "one trick pony".
Generally OPS is specifically used with digital signage class displays, which is why the prices are so high on displays with them. We have been using OPS modules with raspberry pis for years. As is usual, you're paying for the certification/guarantee of performance with digital signage displays, not that they're actually better :)
I work at a major retailer in the electronics department, we use Brightsigns EVERYWHERE. I never even thought of modern solutions being anything between a basic media reader box or a Brightsign. The only solutions I have ever seen personally was the Brightsign or the dinky $20 DVD player we used to use because Samsung wanted to be special and just had have their own display loop on their TVs.
I have a ASRock ION 3D 152D from like 15 years ago, that i used as an XMBC media player (had 3x USB drives hooked up), was great at the time though quite underpowered and now just sits in a cupboard unused. The box even came with cardboard anaglyphic 3d glasses, but like my 12 year old Samsung 3D tv (which came with active 3D LCD glasses) I never utilized the 3D aspect of it.
31:17 On the topic of adobe air, I worked a coop job (paid internship) during university at a device based startup and worked on the desktop client, which was written with Adobe AIR. When I describe AIR to the students of today, thats exactly how I describe it: its like electron, but it uses Flash instead of HTML/CSS/JS. I also love to highlight that it used ActionScript 3, which was, afaik, the only actual implementation of ECMAScript 4 (as browsers declined to implement it etc etc JS history stuff)
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On many embedded processors you can disable JTAG as a form of anti-tamper protection, or to protect your code from being read-out and analyzed.
ION was a beast in its target segment so it's weird that people hate it. You had Atoms with integrated Intel graphics in chipset and you had these. I'd go with the ion machine
Yeah, i had an ION board back in the day. It wasn't super ultra mega but it wasn't bad either, for onboard graphics of the time. Oh wait, I still have my old Eee PC 1215N. Unbearable slow, tried to use it as a dedicated 3d printer interface but the cats kept pushing it off the desk.
I don’t remember people hating ION. IIRC it was a compact, low energy integrated solution that provided far better graphics performance than integrated intel. Maybe because they only came with Atoms and Celerons?
Intel sucking at graphics cards, some things never changed. They could have bought nVidia in 2018 when there were broke and cheap. Now probably its the opposite that happens, or Intel just sell all of its fabs to nVidia.
"Why would anybody ever distribute a slide show over 20 screens": video walls. Those are always about 65" flat screens. So if you want to have a video wall in your airport, shopping mall, or your fancy upscale fashion shop, you need to stack 4x5 65" screens with an ultra slim / "virtually zero" bezel, and use software to split up the video/presentation. This will cost you about 80k USD in displays plus 10k in player hardware, but that is pretty cheap for a video wall, compared to how expensive it used to be. It is also very often easier, and much more modular, to have 20 cheap players connected to the back of 20 displays, instead of having 5 each doing 4 or a single unit trying to address 20 displays .
I'm not asking why people want to make video walls, I'm asking why you'd use $15,000-20,000 of machines with independent processors, each one running a full fat copy of Windows with its own software stack, each one requiring its own independent network connection, instead of a single box from Crestron that just takes one input and divides it into 25. The consumer grade versions of those are like $200; surely a 5x5 model is only going to be a few grand.
Video bandwidth and resolution is the achilles heel of any video matrix product. A 5x5 video wall of 1080p monitors is going to need to be driven with a 9600x5400 signal. That's more than 8K, which is considered an exotically high resolution *now*. Even with my limited experience from the "You'll Have 1366x768 And *Like It*" era, there's no way in hell someone was selling an 8K-capable video matrix splitter in 2010. The only other option would have been to fill a PC with a bunch of Nvidia Quadros with sync connectors and configure the drivers to output a matrix, which would *work*, but would require a full-size tower chassis. Also I have no clue if Nvidia's video matrixing solution was a thing in 2010.
@@CathodeRayDude I think the future plan may have been an upgraded computer module that used the other connector and a dedicated GPU that could output a high resolution and display to 4 with just one box (NC4000)?
I'm guessing the JTAG option is just to enable/disable the ability to use that interface. If your company sets up the management stuff, then locks it with a password, maybe someone could still unlock it via JTAG? Speculating of course, but it would make sense for enterprise devices that a company wouldn't want stolen (although who knows why a digital signage controller mounted to the back of a 75" TV mounted in a store with people all around would be at risk of theft... maybe this is a universal "enterprise" BIOS or something?)
(my first reply seems to be stuck in a mysterious state between existing and not existing thanks to youtube's spam protection, so I'm repeating myself) I can find at least one reference to OPS modules having some currency in digital cinema operations -- where the ability to disable JTAG could make it harder for an insider with access to the display to sneak an unencrypted copy of the movie out of the venue. not that it's necessarily that, but I imagine it's a similar vibe of "the module is handling something someone doesn't want you to make a full-fidelity copy of, but licensed exhibition is fine."
@@vogon3400 i mean you can always just get the SSD out, sata to USB converter and pull the files ngl... unless there's encryption but WinXP... yeah don't think so
@@DEMENTO01there's nothing that says here that JTAG access has to be the sole vulnerability in the entire software and hardware stack! it just had to be credibly enough a flaw to some application being considered for the system that the firmware authors went to the effort of putting in a JTAG port disable -- which, depending on what that switch actually does, might be as simple in implementation as initializing one of the chips on the board in a different mode.
One of the first things that security researchers do to test if your machine is secure is to make sure that the JTAG option has been disabled. Yes, you want to use it to access the computer, but no, not at the cost of removing all authentication towards the machine. So yeah, you want to be able to disable it. A lot of hardware still has the JTAG functionality on a board but not the physical port connected. In that case it is often possible to simply use some prongs to access the JTAG none-the-less.
Found a little guy myself earlier today at work when we swung by the recycling center as usual, saw a HP Prodesk 400 g5 with an I5 9500t 1x16 gb ddr4 & 256 gb ssd.
@@mattelder1971 For sure, the only fault i can really say it has is the display port furthest too the right is not working. But it has 2 more so it's whatever really Otherwise nothing seems wrong with it.
Just a note, When I first did a DIY, I used a mini windows PC, then moved to Linux, then now all my systems are RTSP decoders, this way I can have multiple monitors receiving the same stream. I do this in our locations as well as our airport location. no need to remote into any monitor/pc - I just change the feed. In small one off builds, I just do either windows/linux pc with a browser full screen and feed a dynamic web pages from a server
For the grid mode... it has to be intended for situations like the fast food joint. So you could take a single input video and chop it up across multiple monitors, or maybe do a stinger feature across a few monitors, then switch back to single window slides. Also... five figures in hardware is chump change if you consider big advertising spreads in places like Times Square. Just having the flexibility to do a grid mode in would be neat, especially if it's a reusable setup for many situations (and the computers themselves are way up in an inconvenient location).
But I don't get why you'd use $15,000 of gear when you could do the exact same thing with an $800 device. like what's the value in having an independent controller for every screen that justifies spending twenty times more on it? higher resolution I suppose, but does that matter on a display seen from a hundred feet away?
@@CathodeRayDudemy guess would be redundancy and ease of installation. Running power and networking to each screen is a lot more straightforward than displayport or hdmi. And when something goes wrong (not if, when) it is isolated to the system that has the issue. If you can save time and add reliability then you actually save money by spending more.
I don't think you have fully internalized just how irrelevant $15k is to the type of company who would do a large install of something like this lol. Literally you pointing out the potential savings would trigger a meeting consuming thousands of dollars in employee time. Vendor approvals, compliance requirements, how to update the things on a schedule, pre built run books for servicing them. Nobody at scale makes a decision based on $15k, you'd be willing to spend $150k if it reduces friction and gets you to the finish line faster. Remember there's dozens of companies out there that spend billions on marketing. It's so insignificant in the grand scheme it's like just get er done. LG makes something that slots right in to what we already have off the ground? Whatever let's do it.
@@CathodeRayDudesure, if all you're showing on the grid is one big thing, but if you had a grid of independent screens for most of your purposes, it sure seems nice to be _able_ to spread a single source across it.
I had an Ion 2-based Windows 7 netbook back in the day which worked very well. But that second generation had had the time to work out most of the original Ion platform's issues and also benefitted from significantly better power-saving management for the graphics.
I think the default prices end with 8¢ is exactly because nobody prices things like that. It would make it easy to see at a glance that you've forgotten to fill in a price, akin to using TK in text as a placeholder.
my brain tingles whenever i hear the "let's ask the internet" jingle. you gotta drop the CRD OST someday. I need that as my ringtone and i need that adlib timelapse theme on my driving playlist.
That OPS spec uses a standard JAE TX25 / TX24 plug and all the pinouts are listed in wikipedia. One could probably make a breakout board with $5 of parts and an afternoon of soldering. I just went through the struggle of buying a new television and trying to resolve which one comes with the least amount of malware pre-installed. I wish those OPS panels were more readily available, and I could just shove an apple TV or raspberry pi in the slot. It would also mean that without the malware subsidy my 65” tv would cost more than $300.
15:00 I could see the ATSC tuner module making sense for like a sports bar or Buffalo Wild Wings, where you'd have a bunch of different TV-like objects, and you (especially if you're running a chain) want to only acquire one model of device, and switch them between real TVs and digital signs with minimal downtime. first round of the playoffs and there are like 8 games on simultaneously? turn some of your digital menu space into more space for games by swapping out some OPS modules and changing the page layout on the screens you've got left over.
I've done a couple fire alarm inspections at Before the Wild Wings, they just have a bunch of direct TV boxes in a room. I'm not sure how they send it to each TV, I imagine some kind of video double or something.
I love this series. For some reason I find systems like this fascinating. In a past life, around the turn of the century, I repaired barcoding equipment and small handheld computers. It was fascinating how they solved the issues they had in warehousing, and different retail applications. Also, interesting note, I was in a Tim Hortons a while back on one of their menu signs broke down. I noticed, it was running Rasperian Linux.
That’s fascinating, when I was in school, I believe the smartboards (as they were called) just took video input from a separate desktop PC. That was about ten years ago, though.
@@flp322 yeah our boards were installed at the beggining of this year as a countrywide project. They've been pretty useful as well. Some classrooms even did away with normal whiteboards
the ion chipset also includes nvidia graphics as well, the early atoms also didn't have integrated graphics either. in this case the specific nvidia gpu in this would be a Geforce 9400m G, it also did video decoding. so in this operation it does both chipset duty and gpu duty. (edit) oh yeah, the way the gpu is connected to the system is weird, the nvidia dgpu die inside the chipset itself is actually wired up to the cpu as if it were an igpu, so graphics memory is actually shared system memory between gpu and cpu.
Soo the 230 and 330 were NOT SoCs. They don't even have IGP (the only Atoms that don't). They used Intel 945 chipsets (the ones from Core2Duo, released ~2005; Atom in 2008). The Nvidia ION setup was used later as a multi-media chipset to offer some video decoding, so the Atoms "could" be used as HTPCs.
That looks like an Atom N330 chip. It's a dual die dual core 64 bit processor with hyperthreading. It came out in the Core 2 Duo era but was based on an alternative design. IIRC they followed the original Pentium 3 chip design lineage instead of the super pipelined Pentium 4 line. They were super low wattage, ran at 1.6Ghz, and gave you 2C/4T of 64bit processing for cheap. The processor used 8 watts IIRC, and the required chipset i945, used 20 watts, so the cooling package on the chipset was actually bigger and more demanding than the CPU. The Intel 945GCLF2 motherboard was (IMO) the pinnacle application of this chip. I ran one of these for years on Linux.
2013/2014 I had to manage an LG digital sign for my employer. They bought it before I started there and it was loaded by... PR would send me a .pptx, I would export it to a video file and push it to the signage over the network. Not so bad, but it would lose the video every time power was lost, which was dozens of times a week (thank you crummy rural power company). That sign mysteriously found its way to recycling during a remodel and I now use an RPi, update a web page and have the page refresh periodically. Also, the Atom 330 haunts me. Just... Terrible.
4 years ago I inherited a Samsung 400UXN digital signage monitor. It's a 40" WXGA monitor that incorporates a 1.9GHz Athlon X2 Dual Core BE-2300, 1GB RAM and 8GB Flash storage, running XP Embedded. I tried to get OpenELEC to run on it, but unfortunately the VGA controller isn't supported by Linux… So it's now just sitting in a corner gathering dust.
Im feeling real sick right now. This was the perfect video to see just as I finally get to crawl into my bed ❤❤❤ Comment 2.0: One day I'd love to see you whack proxmox or k8s on all the little guys and see how much they can be upcycled to do. Comment 3.0: That popout computer module is the same thinking that goes into modern smart screens (the sort that needs a PC to turn them into teams devices), nothing about this thought process has changed. I literally installed a brand new one in our office running windows 10 with an i5 a few weeks ago. If that PC was to die rather than shipping away the whole 60" screen we just order another computer module from the manufacturer. Comment 3.0a And then you pull out the OPS module, beat me to it.
I once found one of those half slim SATA drives in a printer, don't remember the model. Presumably it was used as a cache for documents. It definitely wasn't what I was expecting to find inside. It was only 8gb.
There were (and possibly still are?) OPS capable displays with screen sizes in the 42-55" range. I worked with several different models from LG, Dell, and NEC in a prior life that all had OPS ports. The NEC was 43", and actually came with a TV tuner/component/s-video/vga card in the slot iirc. And shipping these things is absolutely what kills used sales; that 43" NEC had a solid steel chassis that made it weigh something like 60lbs, plus they're surprisingly fragile in the care of normal courier services. We had so many issues with larger displays getting destroyed in shipping from the manufacturer at my last job, that we started loading them into our work van to courier to the job site ourselves.
I took a "broken" little guy out of an automated forklift and replaced the cmos battery instead of throwing it away. now its my pfsense box, its got a dang 11th gen i7 in it.
EDIT: atoms of that age were NOT an SOC. I have an OPS module with an i7 4700EQ, while it would have been smart to make an adapter I just soldered a barrel jack onto the power pins and feed it 19v that way... Rear HDMI doesn't have audio support though so it's useless as a media PC lol
That JTAG option around 20:45 will be because ordinarily, Intel's shipped products have their JTAG interfaces switched off by bits set inside the processor/chipset and there be pin muxing Shenanigans at play. The option will be to make that interface available again and allow a JTAG adaptor to be hooked up and used with the interface.
30:23 resolution. monitor wall controllers often max out at 4k input even at the pro level and then your video feed just gets scaled across your displays, not taking advantage of their native resolution. if you want every display in a big wall running at its native resolution you basically have two options. 1. you have a network box like this but with beefy hardware chopping up a huge canvas into 1080p chunks and sending them compressed over network, or you have an unfathomably expensive frame full of cards from evertz or ross or grassvalley doing the same thing using FPGAs and sending it out over a bunch of SDI runs. the latter sollution somewhat overlaps with multiview generation which is sort of the opposite, taking a bunch of individual sources and displaying scaled down versions in grids so your TD can see every camera all at once and stuff like that.
in particular one of the recent jobs my company did had a ross ultiscape frame misusing its PIP canvas with these bizare-shaped raster areas, stuff like 512x17,280 and 5,760x5,760 so that five multiview cards could drive hundreds of LED wall banners and tickers and displays, which went out over a raft of SDI into LED wall controllers that further chopped those output canvas tiles into weirder smaller bits to go to each banner and ticker over what i assume must have been ASI although anything beyond the LED controller inputs was out of our scope so, grain of salt on that.
resolution matters that much? i mean i figured video walls are generally seen at a distance and even if the pixels are quarter sized nobody would notice. but i guess that makes snse
@@CathodeRayDude anti aliasing / bicubic scaling artifacts on an LED video wall look uniquley awful in ways i struggle to describe, especially on text. it's like there's a mid scoop on my eyes where the high frequency of the screen door effect and the low frequency of the smearing are locked in brutal bloody mideval combat. as for walls made of TVs, yeah it doesn't matter as much. but for a major sports venue it also has the advantage of centralizing the hardware and keeping it in the equip room instead of putting boxes out with the screens where they might be hard to reach.
incedentally as a canadian it is wild to me that in america some college/university campuses qualify as major sports venues and have the budgets and infra to match. what on earth is going on down there
@@famitory okay yeah that makes a lot of sense too, somebody else alluded to that, that it was easier to run power and network up to these screens rather than video. Weird to think about but I guess it's one of those things where unless you work in the industry you just can't intuit the way things scale.
Train and train station displays in Germany are usually a Browser running on Windows or Linux systems. Modern trains have their own TCP/IP networks, running through the whole train, but for station displays sometimes you can easily find the website hosting the respective signs content.
As an IT tech, this channel is a goldmine of information of the bedrock theories and concepts in computing. Especially for a lot of Niche enterprise stuff that I may end up dealing with.
23:00 ~ windows embedded is also for licensing reasons, you volume license embedded images and cna resell them to customer while regular oem is per customer from what i am fammliar
i had no idea digital signs where this involved! i assumed non-interactive stuff where, at worst, just regular TVs fed by some dvb-t box so every tv just needed a cheap coax cable converging into it and different streams where just tuned to different channels, eventually updated from the box end when needed OR *at best* purpose specific monitors with a lan port converging into a single local network pc for video streams, or some removable storage for playback, where to upload the stream from said pc remotely when needed or something alike....i was very wrong lol
It's always interesting to see this kind of modules, at work we have some digital signage type screens, Just Raspberry Pi's running sway and chromium in kiosk mode. Simply configured over Ansible or whenever the web application itself gets changed.
The OPS tuner modules could be for use after one of the displays has lived its life as a digital sign and later sold off. Someone could buy the tuner module and turn the former sign into an actual usable TV.
yooo more littleguys!! pogpogpogpog this series is so enjoyable i love watching all the odd stuff and watch while being mystified by learning more about it
re: digital sign computers: was at a hardware store last week and one of their digital signs had crashed and was stuck on the loading-into-raspberry-pi screen of white text with a few raspberries on a black screen.
I love these videos, these long deep dives into strange genres of computing. Like your other series on quickstart jenkiness. It's fascinating. Thank you.
ION had 64bit memory controller and it is not limited to the 2 GBs the intel chipsets for Atoms were if my memory serves me well. Also as another friend mentioned it had a Geforce GPU with full video decoding capabilities and some 3D acceleration which the Atom couldn't keep up. Of course DDR2 ram The newer version of this concept for Atoms was the Poulsbo 500 which had an ImgTec PowerVR GPU but was showing intel's badges. Atoms were so painfully slow in general but was the first widespread attempt for low power cheap x86 processors for the mass market and course Little Guys! I had an ION small PC cube from Asrock in the eye to buy but never had the cash as a student back in the day I always loved the Little Guys! Great video as always cheers from Greece!
I'm not sure if this counts, but I know of one retailer who use a number assignment/call customer setup hooked up to a display and speakers. However instead of using a 'little guy' they instead have a regular late 2000s/early 2010s ATX half height office PC running CentOS and some DRM protected bespoke software, probably using VNC for remote access but don't know for certain.
I have looked at other comments and it doesn't seem to have been suggested but the extra standoff above the breakout board seem to me to look like hard drive spacing but I couldn't tell if the pass through plug on the docking board was some kind of all in one for a hard drive or not I couldn't see it on my screen
I have a few jpg to composite video boxes. I keep one hooked to my analog A/V setup and displays photos on my '79 sony KV-5100. Also modified another to have a UHF transmitter built in
I was one of those guys who told you about the 2GB of RAM thing on Atoms being wrong. The one I was talking about was the Atom X5-Z8350, which came out in 2016. It's a full SoC, the motherboards you find them on pretty much have the SoC and not much else since it's all fully integrated. I'm not sure how Intel manages to mess up their own site, surely they'd know?
According to my research, the PMU JTAG thing refers to using the JTAG interface to interact with the PMU for debugging the PMU functions, programming PMU firmware, and testing the functionality of the PMU in the development and manufacturing stages. So I think it's just to ensure power management functions are working the best they can.
well there you go I always assumed that the (newer) displays had either SD cards or USB running all their noise lol this was fascinating, much appreciated :)
![Little Guys 7: The Cop-puter [Motorola MW800]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EP3aKEG79DM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Little Guys 7: The Cop-puter [Motorola MW800]](/img/tr.png)
![[MV] A leap of faith...ความเชื่อใจครั้งสุดท้าย (From "Petrichor the series")](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/U1piZH2CNXA/mqdefault.jpg)
I've been informed that the super early Atoms (this is one of the first) were *not* fully SoCified yet and still required a chipset, so the ION probably is performing north/southbridge functions. Also, by the time this was made, XP was no longer being offered for new machines, so the embedded version was probably the only viable option.
Also, thanks to some viewers I HAVE ordered a cheap aliexpress breakout board for powering up my OPS units, but I'm still looking for an OPS enabled TV! Ideally 42" or smaller, and preferably with the touch functionality, but if you have *anything* and are in the greater pacific northwest, please get in touch - cathoderaydude at gmail. Thanks!
I had ION in hp 311 netbook. It was ok, surprising laptop where GPU is bottlenecked by CPU
I have an idea that might help you get a display. I used to intern at a New York public school, EVERY classroom had a Smartboard. And thanks to you I now know what the included OPS means. This might be a shot in the dark but if you contact your local DoE they might have discontinued equipment to sell off lease including a Smartboard.
nowdays the brightsign players tend to be a metallic blue. The still look beautiful ;)
ION in similar designs is used not just as a chipset but also for hardware decode acceleration which wasn't good at all on atom certified chipset from intel.
@@MatteoSaitta oh! That makes a ton of sense! I had read that the ion had video decoding silicon but it completely missed me that it would be important here, you're absolutely right.
I love how this Little Guy is actually an even Littler Guy piloting the Little Guy like a mech.
Eva unit thin client
@@skinwalker69420 Get in the Little One Shinji
Like Eric Clapton, with levers and pulleys
Littleception :D
Master Blaster!
Just wanted to say that I appreciate the “pop” noise that accompanies additional text added in post. I don’t always have my eyes focused on the screen 100% of the time during these videos, so the pop helps give me an audio cue that there’s something new on the screen I should be paying attention to read.
I know it’s a few extra steps in editing but it is really appreciated and good like… vidsmithship.
Thanks!
I can't take credit, it was a viewer request, but it made a ton of sense and it's no skin off my back to do it; glad it's helpful!
I love it too
A friend of mine runs a drycleaner and years ago he was lamenting having to pay through the butt for his signage guy to update some system. Chromecasts had just come out and I suggested he try one for a small fraction of the cost and set his promos as a screensaver. Months later he said the biggest problem was avoiding casting soccer games to it while he was working and getting distracted.
a boyfriend? 🤭
I have also used a Chromecast (that I got for free with TH-cam TV years back) as digital signage for a budget gym that needed my help, and the "remote management" of just adding JPEGs to a Google Photos album as well as the clock on-screen made it actually look and work nicely for them. Never found anything easier that also looked good on-screen (the Amazon players are just a 720p cutbus for JPEGs).
What if he plugged in a computer and set the adverts as a Screensaver? No need for a Chromecast
@@kreuner11 if a PC can be acquired for free, then yeah go for it. Otherwise getting a $30 Chromecast seems way more cost effective.
take a look at Binary Emotions Digital signage. I'ts an italian guy - Marco. I've used it for years. 1 time payment.
the “lg” stands for “little guy”
CANNOT BELIEVE I MISSED THIS
@@CathodeRayDude sometimes it's just TOO in your face!
In your fake presentation I automatically assumed LG was little guy 😂 I forgot the device was made by LG!
Lucky Goldstar for business, but Little Guy for friends!
...and "Life's Good" if ya nasty! 😉🤣
Lousy goods
The SSD form factor used by this little guy (with the 4 mounting screws) was developed by the SFF Committee and was adopted as an industry standard in 2009 by JEDEC as MO-297. JEDEC refers to it as “Slim Lite SSD Assembly” but industry almost universally uses “half slim” branding instead. Apacer has a “Sata Disk Modules” line of products which pre-date the standard that are offered in about a dozen ad-hoc/non-standard form factors and are still being made. As far as I can find Apacer has only ever used the “half slim” branding for standards compatible ssds. The non-standard modules being described as “half slim” are listing errors by resellers.
That doesn't surprise me at all; thank you for the elucidation!
@@CathodeRayDude resellers trying to pass one thing for another, not surprising at all
I had an Acer Chromebook that used this kind of SSD, even though there was room for a full-sized laptop drive. This was way back in the early days, probably first or second generation.
@@CathodeRayDude You probably have a bunch of these modules already and don't even know it. Most lower capacity 2.5in SSDs are actually small modules like this in an oversized shell. Some (Crucial BX500 and Lexar NS100 at least) are this exact half slim form factor, while others have slightly different footprints and mounting holes.
I cracked open one of those cheap WD green SATA SSDs and it had the same form factor PCB inside. Became handy to upgrade an ancient win7 tablet to more than 16GB storage...
I'm absolutely the sort of nerd who is entertained by knowledge I will never have any use for, which is why I'm so glad you're doing this series. Each episode is like a comfy little adventure into a world I didn't know existed.
Same here! So cool. :)
I 3rd this minus the supernerd part. CRTguy is selling himself short 'cos this appeals to a much larger range of ppl than he suggests.
Comfy little adventure? Couldn't be me, I'm here for the discourse. I watch these kinds of videos with a bucket of popcorn, kicking my feet girlishly as the person behind the camera calls the designers and electrical engineers horrible names for the way they laid out their PCB traces, and I enjoy every second of it. /j /lh
Recreational DLC if you will I'm in the same boat as you
I think you hit the nail on the head as to why LG didn't or couldn't "trim down" the OS. I've worked with XP Embedded, WES 2009, Windows Embedded Standard 7, and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2019 (Microsoft sucks at naming things, Xbox anyone?), and while it is possible to remove individual OS components, doing so often removes seemingly unrelated functionality elsewhere in the OS. These dependencies are often not properly documented, so they are only discovered during testing when something does not work. To make a Windows Embedded image as flexible as possible, it's often less hassle to not get too aggressive with the component trimming.
I'm cashier at gas station in Poland. We are still usin win7emb. It just as solid as XP, also with literally no replacement. I think management went with win7 due to security... on LAN... :D
Bingo, you beat me to it. In particular, removing WMP breaks all sorts of ActiveX controls that you wouldn't think have anything to do with WMP. Usually it's because the control is capable of producing audio, and it'll freak out if it can't find WMP's codecs. This is particularly fun when you're working with industrial panel PCs running XPe that don't even have a speaker, but still crash when their HMI/SCADA/SPC software tries to load a charting or alarming control. That ~20MB saved on the install turns into hours of labour per end user to troubleshoot and work around it.
And the reason to use Embedded rather than the full version of the OS is that Embedded was cheaper, so it made sense to use it even if you didn't strip anything out of it.
Also makes me wonder if the PoC engineer was trying to cut down the install size with trial and error, and boss came along and said "stop spending time on this, we'll upgrade from 512mb"
@@ChrisHarringtonMinneapolis No, because up-front labor is amortized on per-unit costs unlike storage. I think Ed got it right here -- the costs saved aren't worth the future compatibility issues with dependency charts that look like an Arkansas family tree. hehe ;-)
"Either you're a giant nerd, or ... I don't know what you're doing on my channel."
Imagine calling out your entire audience 🙃
Ah man, I guess my second comment got caught in the spam filter. Not sure if you can find it but there are definitely ways to power up those OPS PCs. The original comment had some search terms for you.
This is my 1st time here and I took that as a sign that I'm in the right place.
It's TH-cam they delete a lot of comments. About 90% of my comments are removed.
all this time consumers "smart tvs" could've had replaceable upgradable modules, the last smart tv by LG we used the wifi died, then the ethernet, then the OS would randomly complain about no space and lock up requring a factory reset, supposidly the claims where bad memory leaks due to their outsourced webos that was never fixed for tvs 3-5years old, the sheer volume of tvs out there that would otherwise be perfectly funtional if not for bloatware should be a crime.
so funnily enough Samsung had the same idea and sold smart TVs with an upgrade slot... for like one model year AFAIK. I don't even remember if it was a line-wide thing or just one of those things they put on flagship TVs to make the flagship seem less of a waste of money.
WebOS was never intended for TVs (it's a tablet/phone OS after all), and when HP was handling it years back, it was massively underfunded and buggy as hell. And I was thinking LG would do something about it (there are bugs from like 2011 that were never fixed) but it looks like they never did. Memory leaks were common problem on Palm Pre, on which the whole system originated!
A major pet peeve of mine, I want my TV to just be... a display. either for a console or my full fledged HTPC. having a socketed module would just be another input device. were all used to pushing the Input button, and selecting HDMI1, AV2, DTV, etc etc. It would be simple to have SmartTV as one of the inputs. but no, plugging the TV in requires me to wait 2 minutes whilst it boots android. and then complain that it does not have wifi. or if you pick up the remote wrong, it drops whatever your doing and tries to load netflix. If I could choose what module I jack into the SmartTV slot, I would absolutely use it. Id thought that waay before this video, but now I know its a known standard... im a bit peeved. I would totally buy a MiSTer module. how cool would that be?
this is worrying, my LG tv wifi just died.
We have an LG smart tv and webOS is so annoying, especially since it doesn't support Android apps (I wish I could have Kodi on the only 4K TV we have at home) and NOT EVEN ChromeCast, only Apple AirPlay...
So for me the only option to stream my local media is to install the shitty bloated LG smart home app, which needs an LG account to even work, and then wait forever until the app loads all the recent media on my phone (since just using Android's native file selector would have been to easy) and guessing what video I actually want to play, because the file selector only shows thumbnail and time stamp. Tbh even my old Toshiba 1080p "dumb" TV with an Android TV stick is sooo much more convenient
In the that era, the RAM depended on the chipset. 945 G/GZ/GM supports 4GB of maximum memory and 945GC supports only 2GB. I believe the Ion is also 4GB of RAM. The Ion is a GeForce 9400 M G but it's also the memory controller. The Ion could be DDR2 or DDR3. It also handles the PCIe lanes and SATA and stuff like that, and I believe it supports RAID 0 and 1.
The 9400M present on macbooks can work with 8GB of ddr3 ram, and the 9400 G too (desktop version) present on imacs
There is another part to the story and that is Intel doesn't go back and revalidate old platforms when new higher capacitiy ram chips are made
6th gen (maybe 7th gen idk) are quite happy to support 128gb of RAM, but 32gb ddr4 udimms only came out in the 9th gen
(They did go back and validate on 8th gen apparently)
I still remember when 775 was quite common. At least in my friends computers. I was checking memory compatibility, max ram etc... And it never was true. I remember gigabyte 775 mobo "Supports up to 4gb of ddr2" was working fine with 8gb, with c2d 😂 (early days of modded minecraft, that sh... needed A LOT). Also there was something similar on AMD platforms too. Still owning a C2Q with 8G that serves sometimes as a minecraft server :D
@@carmonben Correct, Intel does not go back and re-validate memory maximums. The Alder Lake N series chips for example will list 16GB of RAM as the max. But, that is because when they launched, that was pretty much as much DDR5 as you could get in a single SODIMM. Nowadays you can just slab a 32GB stick in there and it'll work.
yea theres no reason it would be limited to 4 or 8 gb when 32gb is supported on these chipsets and socket 775. you still have to enable /pae /4gb in sys ini or windows configuration utility.
windows also doesnt automatically enable dual / quad channel ram either. not for these boards if i recall
The TVs we use for digital signs where I work are definitely not ordinary televisions. They are commercial models, designed to run for years without interruption. So far, out of 180 displays we have had deployed for the past 4 years, we have not had to replace one yet, though several of the little guys attached to them (which run android and are scheduled, tracked, and managed remotely by a contracted service provider) have had to be replaced. I suspect LGs primary purpose in building the large breakout box for the NC2000 was for if you had an existing TV that didn't have the built in PC slot.
So... A regular TV with better capacitors
I don't know why, but everytime you said "MP4 to HDMI" my mind went straight to that "HDMI to Garden Hose Adapter" image.
What is that?
@@bend8353 It's an adapter that plugs into your HDMI and turns the data into water. It's useful if you want to do gardening but only have a game console at hand
Finally I can play wav files through my garden hose!
@@bend8353 an adapter from garden hose to HDMI
@@bend8353It adapts HDMI to a garden hose (I believe Gardena-brand) connector. Simple.
I'm glad you finally mentioned bright sign; when I worked for a company that rhymes with San Francisco I installed their system of signage in a building which were just rebadged versions of the high end bright signs. They were centrally managed and could do things you could only dream of with a normal PC. They were pulling in a multicast TV stream on most TVs, but we had a video wall with 9 of them and they supported video walling natively. They could also send IR and serial commands natively which we used to turn the TVs off and on on a schedule.
Edit: wasn't expecting this to be capable of video walls. I suspect the only reason to do it with multiple instead of using a video wall controller is that the displays can run at their native resolution whereas a video wall controller would be limited to 1080/4k
?Cisco
@@UnforgetableLuncheon Nabisco?
Crisco?
@@danrmanalt ... Man...Disco?
This a tip for you single handley helping solve a problem at my work with this video!
Once I saw the mention about the brightsign boxes, my eyes lit up! We've been looking for a way to have video/imagery looping on TV's in our stores without having to manage locally! Once I realized all the other stuff it could do, I ordered it right away. In the process of deploying more as we speak
The OPS segment made me realise why the “television screens” displaying information in my local A&E had bright red stickers proclaiming “THIS IS NOT A TV”: They were just big fuck-off LCD displays with OPS computer modules installed!
Either OPS or an embedded proc; a lot of these things nowadays have a fully integrated Android gadget running a custom software stack specifically for signage, and yeah, no tuner!
I'm given to understand that most signage grade displays not only lack a tuner they have cut back as far as they can on image processing -- there's no motion compensation or other nice things.
@@monad_tcp Guns aren’t really a thing here in the UK
@@CathodeRayDude so being a full PC under the hood, you can effectively run it as an all-in-one on a really big display, no?
@@EricJorgensenDoes this reduce their latency?
"JPG to HDMI Converter" made me laugh.
For a slightly creepy example of a more sophisticated digital signage network that must have some smarts behind it: when Prince Philip died in the UK every single digital advertising board on major roads changed to an image of him announcing the death. Assume one company was responsible for most of those billboards and just decided to do it but it was a bit weird all the same. Must have been thousands of billboards that all changed at once so presumably the ad server they talk to started to simply serve up that one image.
I guess maybe it happened when queenie croaked too but I can't confirm, didn't see it. Was too busy trying to get out of the country.
lol, the queenie croaked.
maybe there some sort of law or something that public sineage might be used to broadcast important government messages, I don't know the UK
Global (who also do Radio), Clearsign and Elonex are three of the bigger ones here in the UK. But when you have networks of thousands of signs, hopefully you have a protocol for major events.
When Prince Phillip died, our TV stations switched to 24-hour, round-the-clock coverage of his death. I'm in Australia. I felt embarassed.
@@monad_tcp no law for digital signage, but the BBC is obligated to interrupt broadcasting to cover major events/incidents, and other broadcasters are "strongly advised" to interrupt (though they are not required to actually cover the incident like the BBC are - those broadcasters can simply terminate programming, as many broadcasters did when the queen died).
as another reply pointed out: Global are one of the big names in digital signage, and they also have a pretty expansive radio network. it would make sense if Global took advantage of the heads-up they get as a news outlet to also take over signs they owned and announce the news too (news stations receive advance warning of major broadcast messages, particularly notable deaths, before it's put to air). no idea if clearsign or elonex have similar industrial ties to news.
watching these videos is like being a kid with a stick poking dead things on the side of the road/in the woods to see how they look up close
VGA can get by with between 6 and 10 wires depending on the monitor - 10 gives you RGB, Hsync, and VSync, and a ground for each, but some VGA monitors will accept composite sync for 8 wires, and some can use sync on green which leaves you 6. All the other wires are for stuff like EDID, I2C, etc.
I am one of the guys using the OPS ATSC module! My specific flavor of brain damage includes "Good TVs are expensive but barely used signage displays are not" and that's culminated in rocking a $50 "Used for CES" NEC V552 for the last ~4 years as the living room TV. 1080p AHVA with 16.7M color panel.
yeah no this doesn't surprise me
29:49 Nearly all big Fastfood restaurants here in germany have this, they have about 4-5 screens above the counter and they display the menu there, but at some time all displays will start playing a big video (for example for a new burger) at the same time, really looks impressive when they do this... and I saw one screen was "crashed" because there was no boot-device available but the other displays still played the big video at the same time, so they seem to use a PC for EVERY display!
I've long wished that no 'smart' TVs existed, and all TVs were actually just monitors with OPS style modules.
Yes. Even using compute modules would be good. Or I guess whatever the smallest, cheapest computers are that you can still easily connect to a hard drive or SSD.
Never gonna happen, wouldn't be a good idea either.
The Image processing in TV's is optimised on a model by model (to some extent unit by unit) basis, this is especially important in the age of HDR where TV's are expected to adjust & roll-off the PQ curve & colour gamut to within the spec of that specific TV.
Monitors need basic processing done for them by the PC but highend HDR monitors are doing increasingly more processing on the monitor itself.
Switching to OPS would not only require a lot more calibration than your average consumer is comfortable with (in my experience most are to scared to even change the picture mode) but even with that you'll never get the results of an image processor optimized for that panel.
And when consumers are looking at TV's side by side in a showroom (not something you do with monitors) the minuta of picture quality really matters.
The current system makes alot more sense. Have a built in SoC with software designed for that model. Include a Smart OS as you need the SoC anyway so why force customers to buy another media device.
And if customers don't like the built in option they can choose from a wide variety of Smart boxes on the market whilst maintaining the built in image processing no matter what device they use, a win win.
So as you can already connect a variety of smart devices, OPS would just overcomplicate the situation & add many more problems than it solves.
If you hate your TV's OS that much just buy an Apple TV, Nvidia Shield or build your own Media PC. We don't need to change the entire TV ecosystem to get the advantage of choice.
@@MsMarco6I agree it's never gonna happen, but not for the reasons mentioned. I suggest it's neve gonna happen because most people are fine with having ads choked down their gullet and a lifetime of 2 years casual use, if their TV is 500 instead of 2k dollars.
The signage PCs are usually color-matched quite well out of the factory, because many of those will be used in a mosaic application next to its brothers. They're also quite a lot more reliable, because they're expected to work 16 to 24 h a day, every day, for the duration of the service contract, and at brightnesses visible in well-lit rooms.
Frankly, I'd be willing to pay some premium for a TV that was basically a monitor. I don't watch TV. The inbuilt OSes are invariably slow as molasses and out of support in 3 years. Appliances have a long history of expected lifetimes of 10+ years, but TVs have strayed from that.
@@MsMarco6 you entirely misunderstood the point, and also the distinction between 'monitor' and 'tv'. Removing 'smart' features doesn't mean removing the image processing hardware. A 'dumb' TV can still have DSPs, configuration/calibration presets etc. That isn't what the 'smart' in 'smart TVs' means. Furthermore, modularity can be achieved without sacrificing convenience. I'm under no illusions about how the nature of business and human greed makes my desire unlikely. I'm talking in ideals, as indicated by the word "wished". Begone with your obstinate pessimism, your misery is irrational and unwarranted.
@@MsMarco6the problem with smart tvs is that even when you use it as a dumb tv it still negatively effects the experience by being slow or injecting ads
i *think* you can get away with only 6 conductors for VGA
my evidence for this? the most electrically cursed dongle in my collection is a passive DE-15 to USB mini-B, carrying the standard RGB, H-sync, and V-sync over the 5 signal wires, and using the cable shield and mini-B shroud for GND
There is never a good excuse for that. haha
Why didn't they use sync-on-green and drop a couple of those redundant conductors? Cowards.
I knew what it was immediately, as I worked with digital sign, POS machines, and firewall development. Most people will never see one of these devices not attached to the back of a screen or under a sales counter somewhere, I got to see them on my workbench, sometimes in pieces. The layout is intended to be as compact as possible, the recessed USB port is probably for a license dongle that unlocks whatever software the vendor put on it - often times it must be in that specific USB port. They can often be converted to a normal PC running normal software relatively easily, but they tend not to be very powerful, because they are built more for reliability and compactness than for speed of operation.
So going a little deeper than just “Hey, the early Atoms were just CPUs and not SOCs”, the Ion chipset was originally supposed to be paired with the Atom processors (in direct competition with AMD’s low-powered CPU and IGP solution of the time).
Then people figured out they worked with the Core 2 processors.
You should be able to install OS X 10.6 on this machine.
oh my god
@@CathodeRayDude that would make it Guy MacLittle.
Speaking of commercial equipment, if there is a closing Rue21 near you they are selling their equipment from the back of the store. I bought their music player, something called a "Playnetwork MC500" for $12. Looks like its just a boring little intel box but I guess ill find out at the end of the month when the store actually closes and I can go pick it up! Also got a rack UPS and PDU for $12 each. No digital signage controllers at my location unfortunately.
I always wonder how far into the video I’ll go before I point at the screen and shout. Today it was 00:05:25. THAT’S A BRIGHTSIGN! FWIW, we’ve kicked Brightsign to the curb around here. They’re overly complicated and somewhat unreliable compared to competitors who are now taking Brightsign’s lunch. Last week lecture capture machines. This week digital signage! It’s like you’re slowly discovering the existence of entire verticals in which I am entrenched. Next week… streaming appliances, maybe? I’ve got a pretty sweet one sitting by my desk that we retired a couple of years back… It’s too cool to send to the e-waste pile in the sky.
I have looked into streaming appliances a *little* bit - generally speaking they seem too simplistic (or too dependent on cloud services I don't have a subscription to) to cover in a video, but maybe I'm wrong. What's the deets on the one you have?
Which solution are you moving to, from Brightsign?
We’re moving from a collection of different systems to Vitec. Brightsign only really works for our screens that never change. I couldn’t get the marketing department to understand the Brightsign backend and teaching 20 odd non technical staff how to schedule 200 screens with it was nightmare fuel.
It's funny because the DS company I work for specifically poaches from BS clients and similar because they find those systems too complex for non-technical people, smaller businesses, etc. We sell them on cheaper devices with a dumbed-down management platform that even a marketing person can handle and our clients eat it up.
@@Number1Void Indeed. I had a client who's experience with BrightSign was so spectacularly bad (specified by a different consultant, and a big part of the reason that consultant was "invited" to leave the premises with a police escort) that they told me, despite a near 20 year relationship with them, if I even thought of specifying BS in one of their projects I wouldn't be welcome back either.
Which Vitec platform are you using? I'm not convinced that EasyTV is nearly the panacea their sales people make it out to be, but at least so far the experience has been better than BS. (Though also it's primarily IPTV/VOD with a side of Digital Signage)
This is my favorite tech series on TH-cam at the moment. I have always been fascinated with Mini PCs in all varieties! I have a little ThinkCentre M600 Tiny sitting behind my TV (for *cough*legal*cough* emulation) and used an absurd amount of white label Mini PCs as routers, access points, you name it, and they're always so interestingly designed. Even still I've never seen or heard of any of the featured devices and the detail you go into about them really sates my curiosity! Thanks Dude.
Those thinkcentre tinies are *so great*, especially since with the dock-displays IBM has they are about as close to this sort of specific embed-in-display form factor as makes sense for a household user. my wife currently has an aging (but sufficiently capable for ordinary tasks) HP AIO and I've considered getting such a setup to make things easier on her. For such small devices, they're fairly easy to get into and modify the hardware (add RAM or storage, replace CPU, etc.)
Would be cool to do a fundraising stream to buy a display if one doesn’t magically show up locally. You might ask the event coordinators at local convention centers what happens when they retire their old displays. I help run a conference in Michigan, and it seems like our venue is changing / upgrading digital signage pretty frequently. Have to imagine they go somewhere. Here in Seattle, I’m surprised they’ve never shown up at RePC.
So there's a few issues wrt ordering one. For one thing, I don't trust any seller to know how to pack a TV, so it could arrive smashed; don't want to be in that situation. Also, all the ones I can find for sale (that aren't brand new and over $4k) are enormous; I have no room for another 65" TV anywhere. And one HAS shown up at REPC (4, actually) but the image quality is awful. I could get it for probably $150, but it's once again a 65" or 75" set that I have no use for other than a demonstration. I'd much prefer to get a 32" or 40" set that I can afford to keep around and use, so that's what I'm hoping for.
@@CathodeRayDude running out of space to put your stuff is horrible. I'm facing a similar problem right now where a big chunk of my home lab has spilled out of my office and into the dining room along the wall. Wife isn't too happy, so I guess I'm going to have to look into adding on to my office.
Fun fact I guess? The first front end client for League of Legends was made in Adobe Air.
If anyone remembers the desktop version of TweetDeck, I believe that might’ve been based on AIR too (could just be misremembering, though).
The large missing QFP chip and corresponding missing RAM chips on the bottom was for a DisplayLink version.
I love this series. I really like the industrial PCs, and how they're designed, and the extreme flexibility you have with them. Not to mention the "tinkering" aspect when you see a unpopulated connector. Please more!
I thought that the purple brightside looked familiar, then I realised that it had the same purple that Roku uses for their brand colour.
Turns out Roku manufactured it.
30:25 I can speak to this, sign companies will sell you anything, will install anything, and won't tell you that it can be done with a raspberry pi and a web server. And most companies don't have people in charge of signage that knows better: "That's just what it costs, don't like it, don't have a sign."
United States thing. You need a special training to figure out the obvious thing
I disagree, the ease and power of a commercial system is why a client is willing to pay more. I have installed numerous BrightSign units for clients and they run flawlessly for years, some have been in museum displays for over a decade.
It depends on how reliable your system has to be. For example to show a dynamic webpage without disconnecting from the internet and killing the SD card or the Raspberry Pi is not an easy task. FullPageOS helps a lot with that, but it has its quirks.
@@adameichler or you can just use pisignage… the solution that’s been cooked in pi for almost a decade now. 🤷♂️
Quite a lot of the time in business you're not paying for the solution itself, you're paying for something to be someone else's problem. At the mid scale, in between "there's five of us total, we all do everything" and "there's an in-house department for that", there's a lot to be said for sticking to your core competencies and outsourcing the rest of what you need to do to other businesses for whom that thing is their core competency.
Say you've rolled your own solution with a raspberry pis and a web server, it runs all the menu displays in your small chain of burger joints. One day every display in your entire company breaks. You have no idea why. Suddenly your entire IT team (all three of them) is in crisis mode troubleshooting, potentially for days. What happens if a cash register breaks in the meantime? Who handles day to day support while this is going on?
On the other hand if you outsourced your signage and your contract has an SLA, you call your signage company, they fix it, if they can't fix it they come in and replace everything with a known-working system, which they have in stock, because they're a signage company. If they can't even do that, they pay you the compensation specified in the contract for breaching their SLA. At no point is it your problem to solve. That's worth a lot of money.
The little nuances of the details you find in these computers I find quite entertaining as well as intriguing as I know most people would brush past them, even some IT guys I know. Great video sir! Love the adventure of detail you bring to your videos!
That they ran a GPU 24/7 without a heatsink or any cooling at all, just the bare chip, for *9 years,* might be one of the craziest things I've ever seen on this channel.
thermodynamics youth pastor voice: "the world is my heatsink"
You must be young 😂
The advantage of Windows embedded was cost. When we were shipping XP embedded on our product, our unit cost was $100 per unit, compared to many hundreds more for other versions. ;)
Thank you for documenting the OPS plug and introducing me to it. We've got some giant touch signage made by a company called Display10 and it needs new compute modules to upgrade us to windows 11. Turns out they're OPS modules and now I have a way to upgrade them!
Little Guys is legit one of my fave video series on TH-cam. Thanks for this.
The fact this one has "dedicated" graphics of some reasonable kind makes me want one, so I made an offer for one on eBay. It also looks rather nice!
You are single handedly the source of about 10 purchases I have made on eBay.
Yes, I did wind up getting it for the low-ball offer I made, and if you want to feel even more vindicated, mine came in it's original shipping container (serials match) and it was originally addressed to a McDonald's restaurant. So yes, it probably did display burger prices on a TV.
while being a chipset and a graphics chip the main function of nvidia ion was switching between its graphics and the integrated intel graphics, to the point some machines only use that function leaving the chipset functionality unconnected. at least one reviewer called it a "one trick pony".
On the original Ion chipset there is no Intel GPU - you're probably thinking of the Ion 2, which is basically a GeForce 210M connected via PCIe x1
Generally OPS is specifically used with digital signage class displays, which is why the prices are so high on displays with them. We have been using OPS modules with raspberry pis for years. As is usual, you're paying for the certification/guarantee of performance with digital signage displays, not that they're actually better :)
I work at a major retailer in the electronics department, we use Brightsigns EVERYWHERE. I never even thought of modern solutions being anything between a basic media reader box or a Brightsign. The only solutions I have ever seen personally was the Brightsign or the dinky $20 DVD player we used to use because Samsung wanted to be special and just had have their own display loop on their TVs.
I have a ASRock ION 3D 152D from like 15 years ago, that i used as an XMBC media player (had 3x USB drives hooked up), was great at the time though quite underpowered and now just sits in a cupboard unused. The box even came with cardboard anaglyphic 3d glasses, but like my 12 year old Samsung 3D tv (which came with active 3D LCD glasses) I never utilized the 3D aspect of it.
Jfyi I marked this recommended video as entertaining, novel, calming and informative 😌
31:17 On the topic of adobe air, I worked a coop job (paid internship) during university at a device based startup and worked on the desktop client, which was written with Adobe AIR. When I describe AIR to the students of today, thats exactly how I describe it: its like electron, but it uses Flash instead of HTML/CSS/JS. I also love to highlight that it used ActionScript 3, which was, afaik, the only actual implementation of ECMAScript 4 (as browsers declined to implement it etc etc JS history stuff)
On many embedded processors you can disable JTAG as a form of anti-tamper protection, or to protect your code from being read-out and analyzed.
ION was a beast in its target segment so it's weird that people hate it. You had Atoms with integrated Intel graphics in chipset and you had these. I'd go with the ion machine
Yeah, i had an ION board back in the day. It wasn't super ultra mega but it wasn't bad either, for onboard graphics of the time. Oh wait, I still have my old Eee PC 1215N. Unbearable slow, tried to use it as a dedicated 3d printer interface but the cats kept pushing it off the desk.
I don’t remember people hating ION. IIRC it was a compact, low energy integrated solution that provided far better graphics performance than integrated intel. Maybe because they only came with Atoms and Celerons?
Intel sucking at graphics cards, some things never changed. They could have bought nVidia in 2018 when there were broke and cheap. Now probably its the opposite that happens, or Intel just sell all of its fabs to nVidia.
"Why would anybody ever distribute a slide show over 20 screens": video walls. Those are always about 65" flat screens. So if you want to have a video wall in your airport, shopping mall, or your fancy upscale fashion shop, you need to stack 4x5 65" screens with an ultra slim / "virtually zero" bezel, and use software to split up the video/presentation. This will cost you about 80k USD in displays plus 10k in player hardware, but that is pretty cheap for a video wall, compared to how expensive it used to be. It is also very often easier, and much more modular, to have 20 cheap players connected to the back of 20 displays, instead of having 5 each doing 4 or a single unit trying to address 20 displays .
I'm not asking why people want to make video walls, I'm asking why you'd use $15,000-20,000 of machines with independent processors, each one running a full fat copy of Windows with its own software stack, each one requiring its own independent network connection, instead of a single box from Crestron that just takes one input and divides it into 25. The consumer grade versions of those are like $200; surely a 5x5 model is only going to be a few grand.
Well, it might be about the resolution. You would have to output incredible resolutions to be able to achieve native on the TVs.
Video bandwidth and resolution is the achilles heel of any video matrix product. A 5x5 video wall of 1080p monitors is going to need to be driven with a 9600x5400 signal. That's more than 8K, which is considered an exotically high resolution *now*. Even with my limited experience from the "You'll Have 1366x768 And *Like It*" era, there's no way in hell someone was selling an 8K-capable video matrix splitter in 2010. The only other option would have been to fill a PC with a bunch of Nvidia Quadros with sync connectors and configure the drivers to output a matrix, which would *work*, but would require a full-size tower chassis. Also I have no clue if Nvidia's video matrixing solution was a thing in 2010.
@@CathodeRayDude I think the future plan may have been an upgraded computer module that used the other connector and a dedicated GPU that could output a high resolution and display to 4 with just one box (NC4000)?
The lack of bezel is most of the cost. I've done it for around $1k, not worrying about bezels
Damn, this dude does not miss! Another banger, thank you for doing this series ❤
16:30 You make it sound like the HD-DVD of slottable computer tech.
my general need for new knowledge is so great i watch every video from you and technology connections and are entertained by them greatly 18:05
I'm guessing the JTAG option is just to enable/disable the ability to use that interface. If your company sets up the management stuff, then locks it with a password, maybe someone could still unlock it via JTAG? Speculating of course, but it would make sense for enterprise devices that a company wouldn't want stolen (although who knows why a digital signage controller mounted to the back of a 75" TV mounted in a store with people all around would be at risk of theft... maybe this is a universal "enterprise" BIOS or something?)
(my first reply seems to be stuck in a mysterious state between existing and not existing thanks to youtube's spam protection, so I'm repeating myself)
I can find at least one reference to OPS modules having some currency in digital cinema operations -- where the ability to disable JTAG could make it harder for an insider with access to the display to sneak an unencrypted copy of the movie out of the venue. not that it's necessarily that, but I imagine it's a similar vibe of "the module is handling something someone doesn't want you to make a full-fidelity copy of, but licensed exhibition is fine."
@@vogon3400 i mean you can always just get the SSD out, sata to USB converter and pull the files ngl... unless there's encryption but WinXP... yeah don't think so
@@DEMENTO01there's nothing that says here that JTAG access has to be the sole vulnerability in the entire software and hardware stack! it just had to be credibly enough a flaw to some application being considered for the system that the firmware authors went to the effort of putting in a JTAG port disable -- which, depending on what that switch actually does, might be as simple in implementation as initializing one of the chips on the board in a different mode.
One of the first things that security researchers do to test if your machine is secure is to make sure that the JTAG option has been disabled. Yes, you want to use it to access the computer, but no, not at the cost of removing all authentication towards the machine. So yeah, you want to be able to disable it. A lot of hardware still has the JTAG functionality on a board but not the physical port connected. In that case it is often possible to simply use some prongs to access the JTAG none-the-less.
Found a little guy myself earlier today at work when we swung by the recycling center as usual, saw a HP Prodesk 400 g5 with an I5 9500t 1x16 gb ddr4 & 256 gb ssd.
Nice fine, and fully capable of running Windows 11.
@@mattelder1971 For sure, the only fault i can really say it has is the display port furthest too the right is not working.
But it has 2 more so it's whatever really
Otherwise nothing seems wrong with it.
Just a note, When I first did a DIY, I used a mini windows PC, then moved to Linux, then now all my systems are RTSP decoders, this way I can have multiple monitors receiving the same stream. I do this in our locations as well as our airport location. no need to remote into any monitor/pc - I just change the feed. In small one off builds, I just do either windows/linux pc with a browser full screen and feed a dynamic web pages from a server
For the grid mode... it has to be intended for situations like the fast food joint. So you could take a single input video and chop it up across multiple monitors, or maybe do a stinger feature across a few monitors, then switch back to single window slides. Also... five figures in hardware is chump change if you consider big advertising spreads in places like Times Square. Just having the flexibility to do a grid mode in would be neat, especially if it's a reusable setup for many situations (and the computers themselves are way up in an inconvenient location).
But I don't get why you'd use $15,000 of gear when you could do the exact same thing with an $800 device. like what's the value in having an independent controller for every screen that justifies spending twenty times more on it? higher resolution I suppose, but does that matter on a display seen from a hundred feet away?
@@CathodeRayDudemy guess would be redundancy and ease of installation. Running power and networking to each screen is a lot more straightforward than displayport or hdmi. And when something goes wrong (not if, when) it is isolated to the system that has the issue. If you can save time and add reliability then you actually save money by spending more.
I don't think you have fully internalized just how irrelevant $15k is to the type of company who would do a large install of something like this lol. Literally you pointing out the potential savings would trigger a meeting consuming thousands of dollars in employee time. Vendor approvals, compliance requirements, how to update the things on a schedule, pre built run books for servicing them. Nobody at scale makes a decision based on $15k, you'd be willing to spend $150k if it reduces friction and gets you to the finish line faster. Remember there's dozens of companies out there that spend billions on marketing. It's so insignificant in the grand scheme it's like just get er done. LG makes something that slots right in to what we already have off the ground? Whatever let's do it.
I have seen these in banks and airports. 50k is a cheap Tuesday afternoon.
@@CathodeRayDudesure, if all you're showing on the grid is one big thing, but if you had a grid of independent screens for most of your purposes, it sure seems nice to be _able_ to spread a single source across it.
I had an Ion 2-based Windows 7 netbook back in the day which worked very well. But that second generation had had the time to work out most of the original Ion platform's issues and also benefitted from significantly better power-saving management for the graphics.
40:19 Every single tech channel I see using one of those pushes me closer and closer to buying one lol
do you know what that is? its pushing me too lol
@@snorlatopus iFixIt sells it as a "Precision Electric Screwdriver", and I'm sure other companies also make them.
I've got one and these are totally bees knees
@@cysioland can u drop the name at least brother
@@snorlatopus I've got a Xiaomi Electric Precision Screwdriver
I think the default prices end with 8¢ is exactly because nobody prices things like that. It would make it easy to see at a glance that you've forgotten to fill in a price, akin to using TK in text as a placeholder.
my brain tingles whenever i hear the "let's ask the internet" jingle. you gotta drop the CRD OST someday. I need that as my ringtone and i need that adlib timelapse theme on my driving playlist.
That OPS spec uses a standard JAE TX25 / TX24 plug and all the pinouts are listed in wikipedia. One could probably make a breakout board with $5 of parts and an afternoon of soldering.
I just went through the struggle of buying a new television and trying to resolve which one comes with the least amount of malware pre-installed. I wish those OPS panels were more readily available, and I could just shove an apple TV or raspberry pi in the slot. It would also mean that without the malware subsidy my 65” tv would cost more than $300.
15:00 I could see the ATSC tuner module making sense for like a sports bar or Buffalo Wild Wings, where you'd have a bunch of different TV-like objects, and you (especially if you're running a chain) want to only acquire one model of device, and switch them between real TVs and digital signs with minimal downtime. first round of the playoffs and there are like 8 games on simultaneously? turn some of your digital menu space into more space for games by swapping out some OPS modules and changing the page layout on the screens you've got left over.
That or for when a store inevitably closes down and sells the signs, people can get one of the modules and convert it into a TV.
I've done a couple fire alarm inspections at Before the Wild Wings, they just have a bunch of direct TV boxes in a room. I'm not sure how they send it to each TV, I imagine some kind of video double or something.
Buffalo Wild Wings has so many TVs, I’ve heard them described as a Best Buy that sells food.
I love this series. For some reason I find systems like this fascinating. In a past life, around the turn of the century, I repaired barcoding equipment and small handheld computers. It was fascinating how they solved the issues they had in warehousing, and different retail applications. Also, interesting note, I was in a Tim Hortons a while back on one of their menu signs broke down. I noticed, it was running Rasperian Linux.
We had interactive boards installed in our school and were instructed to use the "OPS" option when we wanted to use Windows. Now I know what it is!
That’s fascinating, when I was in school, I believe the smartboards (as they were called) just took video input from a separate desktop PC.
That was about ten years ago, though.
@@flp322 yeah our boards were installed at the beggining of this year as a countrywide project. They've been pretty useful as well. Some classrooms even did away with normal whiteboards
Your videos always make my day better. Thank you for what you do.
Aw man, we had these ones at my old job.
I still can't make my mind in regards to whether they sucked ass or were fugging sick.
the ion chipset also includes nvidia graphics as well, the early atoms also didn't have integrated graphics either. in this case the specific nvidia gpu in this would be a Geforce 9400m G, it also did video decoding. so in this operation it does both chipset duty and gpu duty.
(edit)
oh yeah, the way the gpu is connected to the system is weird, the nvidia dgpu die inside the chipset itself is actually wired up to the cpu as if it were an igpu, so graphics memory is actually shared system memory between gpu and cpu.
Soo the 230 and 330 were NOT SoCs. They don't even have IGP (the only Atoms that don't). They used Intel 945 chipsets (the ones from Core2Duo, released ~2005; Atom in 2008).
The Nvidia ION setup was used later as a multi-media chipset to offer some video decoding, so the Atoms "could" be used as HTPCs.
It was actually core duo, not core 2
@@lolman123401 Could be. I only could afford some desktop parts and 945 was required for c2d (yes, I know some MB makers made them work with 8xx)
That looks like an Atom N330 chip. It's a dual die dual core 64 bit processor with hyperthreading. It came out in the Core 2 Duo era but was based on an alternative design. IIRC they followed the original Pentium 3 chip design lineage instead of the super pipelined Pentium 4 line. They were super low wattage, ran at 1.6Ghz, and gave you 2C/4T of 64bit processing for cheap. The processor used 8 watts IIRC, and the required chipset i945, used 20 watts, so the cooling package on the chipset was actually bigger and more demanding than the CPU. The Intel 945GCLF2 motherboard was (IMO) the pinnacle application of this chip. I ran one of these for years on Linux.
2013/2014 I had to manage an LG digital sign for my employer. They bought it before I started there and it was loaded by... PR would send me a .pptx, I would export it to a video file and push it to the signage over the network. Not so bad, but it would lose the video every time power was lost, which was dozens of times a week (thank you crummy rural power company). That sign mysteriously found its way to recycling during a remodel and I now use an RPi, update a web page and have the page refresh periodically.
Also, the Atom 330 haunts me. Just... Terrible.
4 years ago I inherited a Samsung 400UXN digital signage monitor.
It's a 40" WXGA monitor that incorporates a 1.9GHz Athlon X2 Dual Core BE-2300, 1GB RAM and 8GB Flash storage, running XP Embedded.
I tried to get OpenELEC to run on it, but unfortunately the VGA controller isn't supported by Linux… So it's now just sitting in a corner gathering dust.
Im feeling real sick right now. This was the perfect video to see just as I finally get to crawl into my bed ❤❤❤
Comment 2.0:
One day I'd love to see you whack proxmox or k8s on all the little guys and see how much they can be upcycled to do.
Comment 3.0:
That popout computer module is the same thinking that goes into modern smart screens (the sort that needs a PC to turn them into teams devices), nothing about this thought process has changed. I literally installed a brand new one in our office running windows 10 with an i5 a few weeks ago.
If that PC was to die rather than shipping away the whole 60" screen we just order another computer module from the manufacturer.
Comment 3.0a
And then you pull out the OPS module, beat me to it.
I once found one of those half slim SATA drives in a printer, don't remember the model. Presumably it was used as a cache for documents. It definitely wasn't what I was expecting to find inside. It was only 8gb.
There were (and possibly still are?) OPS capable displays with screen sizes in the 42-55" range. I worked with several different models from LG, Dell, and NEC in a prior life that all had OPS ports. The NEC was 43", and actually came with a TV tuner/component/s-video/vga card in the slot iirc. And shipping these things is absolutely what kills used sales; that 43" NEC had a solid steel chassis that made it weigh something like 60lbs, plus they're surprisingly fragile in the care of normal courier services. We had so many issues with larger displays getting destroyed in shipping from the manufacturer at my last job, that we started loading them into our work van to courier to the job site ourselves.
I took a "broken" little guy out of an automated forklift and replaced the cmos battery instead of throwing it away. now its my pfsense box, its got a dang 11th gen i7 in it.
EDIT: atoms of that age were NOT an SOC.
I have an OPS module with an i7 4700EQ, while it would have been smart to make an adapter I just soldered a barrel jack onto the power pins and feed it 19v that way... Rear HDMI doesn't have audio support though so it's useless as a media PC lol
yep, I've since been informed - I'd read about the Atom but I thought it was meant to be an SoC from the get-go!
That JTAG option around 20:45 will be because ordinarily, Intel's shipped products have their JTAG interfaces switched off by bits set inside the processor/chipset and there be pin muxing Shenanigans at play. The option will be to make that interface available again and allow a JTAG adaptor to be hooked up and used with the interface.
30:23 resolution. monitor wall controllers often max out at 4k input even at the pro level and then your video feed just gets scaled across your displays, not taking advantage of their native resolution. if you want every display in a big wall running at its native resolution you basically have two options. 1. you have a network box like this but with beefy hardware chopping up a huge canvas into 1080p chunks and sending them compressed over network, or you have an unfathomably expensive frame full of cards from evertz or ross or grassvalley doing the same thing using FPGAs and sending it out over a bunch of SDI runs. the latter sollution somewhat overlaps with multiview generation which is sort of the opposite, taking a bunch of individual sources and displaying scaled down versions in grids so your TD can see every camera all at once and stuff like that.
in particular one of the recent jobs my company did had a ross ultiscape frame misusing its PIP canvas with these bizare-shaped raster areas, stuff like 512x17,280 and 5,760x5,760 so that five multiview cards could drive hundreds of LED wall banners and tickers and displays, which went out over a raft of SDI into LED wall controllers that further chopped those output canvas tiles into weirder smaller bits to go to each banner and ticker over what i assume must have been ASI although anything beyond the LED controller inputs was out of our scope so, grain of salt on that.
resolution matters that much? i mean i figured video walls are generally seen at a distance and even if the pixels are quarter sized nobody would notice. but i guess that makes snse
@@CathodeRayDude anti aliasing / bicubic scaling artifacts on an LED video wall look uniquley awful in ways i struggle to describe, especially on text. it's like there's a mid scoop on my eyes where the high frequency of the screen door effect and the low frequency of the smearing are locked in brutal bloody mideval combat. as for walls made of TVs, yeah it doesn't matter as much. but for a major sports venue it also has the advantage of centralizing the hardware and keeping it in the equip room instead of putting boxes out with the screens where they might be hard to reach.
incedentally as a canadian it is wild to me that in america some college/university campuses qualify as major sports venues and have the budgets and infra to match. what on earth is going on down there
@@famitory okay yeah that makes a lot of sense too, somebody else alluded to that, that it was easier to run power and network up to these screens rather than video. Weird to think about but I guess it's one of those things where unless you work in the industry you just can't intuit the way things scale.
Train and train station displays in Germany are usually a Browser running on Windows or Linux systems. Modern trains have their own TCP/IP networks, running through the whole train, but for station displays sometimes you can easily find the website hosting the respective signs content.
That laptop has the weed number on it
As an IT tech, this channel is a goldmine of information of the bedrock theories and concepts in computing. Especially for a lot of Niche enterprise stuff that I may end up dealing with.
23:00 ~ windows embedded is also for licensing reasons, you volume license embedded images and cna resell them to customer while regular oem is per customer from what i am fammliar
i had no idea digital signs where this involved! i assumed non-interactive stuff where, at worst, just regular TVs fed by some dvb-t box so every tv just needed a cheap coax cable converging into it and different streams where just tuned to different channels, eventually updated from the box end when needed OR *at best* purpose specific monitors with a lan port converging into a single local network pc for video streams, or some removable storage for playback, where to upload the stream from said pc remotely when needed or something alike....i was very wrong lol
It's always interesting to see this kind of modules, at work we have some digital signage type screens, Just Raspberry Pi's running sway and chromium in kiosk mode.
Simply configured over Ansible or whenever the web application itself gets changed.
The OPS tuner modules could be for use after one of the displays has lived its life as a digital sign and later sold off. Someone could buy the tuner module and turn the former sign into an actual usable TV.
yooo more littleguys!! pogpogpogpog
this series is so enjoyable i love watching all the odd stuff and watch while being mystified by learning more about it
re: digital sign computers:
was at a hardware store last week and one of their digital signs had crashed and was stuck on the loading-into-raspberry-pi screen of white text with a few raspberries on a black screen.
Well now I know what the TV I found in the trash is! Still have it laying around somewhere, but that port is exactly what it has
I bought a D420 the first time I saw you use it on a video a long time ago. It's a great little laptop. Glad to see it again.
I love these videos, these long deep dives into strange genres of computing. Like your other series on quickstart jenkiness. It's fascinating. Thank you.
ION had 64bit memory controller and it is not limited to the 2 GBs the intel chipsets for Atoms were if my memory serves me well.
Also as another friend mentioned it had a Geforce GPU with full video decoding capabilities and some 3D acceleration which the Atom couldn't keep up. Of course DDR2 ram
The newer version of this concept for Atoms was the Poulsbo 500 which had an ImgTec PowerVR GPU but was showing intel's badges.
Atoms were so painfully slow in general but was the first widespread attempt for low power cheap x86 processors for the mass market and course Little Guys!
I had an ION small PC cube from Asrock in the eye to buy but never had the cash as a student back in the day I always loved the Little Guys!
Great video as always cheers from Greece!
00:07
"Man this is quite the package
There's a lot going on with this thing"
I feel you little guy.
I'm not sure if this counts, but I know of one retailer who use a number assignment/call customer setup hooked up to a display and speakers. However instead of using a 'little guy' they instead have a regular late 2000s/early 2010s ATX half height office PC running CentOS and some DRM protected bespoke software, probably using VNC for remote access but don't know for certain.
I have looked at other comments and it doesn't seem to have been suggested but the extra standoff above the breakout board seem to me to look like hard drive spacing but I couldn't tell if the pass through plug on the docking board was some kind of all in one for a hard drive or not I couldn't see it on my screen
One use case might be have each node in the network run a projector from one building onto the wall of an adjacent one for a large but even image.
I have a few jpg to composite video boxes. I keep one hooked to my analog A/V setup and displays photos on my '79 sony KV-5100. Also modified another to have a UHF transmitter built in
I was one of those guys who told you about the 2GB of RAM thing on Atoms being wrong. The one I was talking about was the Atom X5-Z8350, which came out in 2016. It's a full SoC, the motherboards you find them on pretty much have the SoC and not much else since it's all fully integrated. I'm not sure how Intel manages to mess up their own site, surely they'd know?
According to my research, the PMU JTAG thing refers to using the JTAG interface to interact with the PMU for debugging the PMU functions, programming PMU firmware, and testing the functionality of the PMU in the development and manufacturing stages. So I think it's just to ensure power management functions are working the best they can.
well there you go I always assumed that the (newer) displays had either SD cards or USB running all their noise lol this was fascinating, much appreciated :)