City council wants to install TVs in their chambers. Options?

[thestrangebrew1]

As title reads, my city council wants to install a few smart tvs in their chambers for presentations, both by staff and for guest speakers/general public. Public works will most likely run hdmi cables to the tvs and terminate with a few hdmi passthroughs in front of the dais and podium and connect a laptop to it. But are there wireless options and how reliable are they?

Edit: What are some things we need to plan for? ie, the tvs should mirror and display the same thing on both screens etc.

 

[sdifox]

Hardwire is always better. Maybe post a room sketch on where everything is to better respond.

HDMI over IP or HDBaseT should help with range and ease of deployment.

Example, not recommendation

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=41097

Depending on how many display and inputs you need the appropriate matrix switch.

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=24180

Even cheaper option is to have a Google meeting running and just have presenter show their screen with their laptop. You just have a box hooked up to the tv join the meeting. One of those NUC size box would do, or some old desktop. no need for high power either since it is just a display driver. Just RDP to the box and join Google Meet when it's meeting time.

 

[pete6032]

Hardwire because you always have to cater to the least competent and adding in wireless will just make it more complicated.

 

[thestrangebrew1]

Well I shot my load on this earlier. Turns out the City Manager wants to hold off on a permanent solution till after mid-budget but wanted to be able to stream a few presentations next week if possible. We're just going to hook up a tv and hdmi cable and plug it into a laptop for now. But this will be something the City will be doing sometime spring 24.

 

[sdifox]

Well I shot my load on this earlier. Turns out the City Manager wants to hold off on a permanent solution till after mid-budget but wanted to be able to stream a few presentations next week if possible. We're just going to hook up a tv and hdmi cable and plug it into a laptop for now. But this will be something the City will be doing sometime spring 24.

ew

 

[Red Squirrel]

Whatever you do if this is for public use to bring their own machines, make sure it can facilitate all sorts of different connectors, even the weird apple ones. I wouldn't do anything wireless, it just adds an extra layer of complexity. In a perfect world connecting a laptop to a TV should be simple, but when you are doing it with all sorts of random machines, there is bound to be ones that for whatever reason decide to give some trouble.

Although if Powerpoint is mostly what this is going to be used for, having a laptop or desktop (harder to steal) already there is probably the easiest bet that way you're not messing with each individual machine on the spot to get it to display. If anyone is going to come in with a presentation they will just need to put it on a USB stick in proper format. You probably don't want this laptop to be connected to the same vlan as the production network. I'd make sure it also has VLC in case someone wants to play a video.

 

[thestrangebrew1]

Whatever you do if this is for public use to bring their own machines, make sure it can facilitate all sorts of different connectors, even the weird apple ones. I wouldn't do anything wireless, it just adds an extra layer of complexity. In a perfect world connecting a laptop to a TV should be simple, but when you are doing it with all sorts of random machines, there is bound to be ones that for whatever reason decide to give some trouble.

Although if Powerpoint is mostly what this is going to be used for, having a laptop or desktop (harder to steal) already there is probably the easiest bet that way you're not messing with each individual machine on the spot to get it to display. If anyone is going to come in with a presentation they will just need to put it on a USB stick in proper format. You probably don't want this laptop to be connected to the same vlan as the production network. I'd make sure it also has VLC in case someone wants to play a video.

Appreciate the tips! Yeah I think having a dedicated laptop to load presentations or videos would be the best way to go. And we're going to avoid wireless I think. Because we're such a small jurisdiction, we don't have a dedicated IT person and contract the work out, but I figured this couldn't be that difficult so long as everything is planned accordingly.

 

[IronWing]

Appreciate the tips! Yeah I think having a dedicated laptop to load presentations or videos would be the best way to go. And we're going to avoid wireless I think. Because we're such a small jurisdiction, we don't have a dedicated IT person and contract the work out, but I figured this couldn't be that difficult so long as everything is planned accordingly.

If you decide to provide a laptop for folks to load their stuff on, don't ever connect that laptop back into your network without wiping it first. There are utilities that can reset a computer back to a fixed configuration; look into those.

 

[sdifox]

If you decide to provide a laptop for folks to load their stuff on, don't ever connect that laptop back into your network without wiping it first. There are utilities that can reset a computer back to a fixed configuration; look into those.

Make it diskless and netboot is probably good enough. Lock it down with group policy to make sure.