For years, I've dreamed of gaming on a massive LED video wall,
but getting your hands on a new one ain't that easy or cheap.
But what about this discount video wall from Craigslist?
Yeah, I couldn't help myself. Logistics went out this morning and just returned with this palette of rigging material
and these four crates that apparently contain over 30 connecting video wall panels.
Guys, this is some peak high-risk high reward because on the one hand,
there's no support, no warranty, and no return policy on an $11,000 purchase.
But on the other hand, hear me out. Giant customizable video wall?
It's actually even cooler than you thought and set it up in any aspect ratio you want
and you can even configure it to be curved.
I can't wait to see how this all fits together and how freaking awesome
or less awesome it looks once it's built.
I bet we could even use it to show off our sponsor.
Okay, so you want to start with the panel? I think we should start with the boxes because it includes this box too, I'm pretty sure.
Okay, perfect. He's the one who's read the documentation, so I'm kind of following along.
I've barely read the documentation. I read it a little bit.
You read it a little bit? I read it a little bit. Okay.
Oh yeah, so this is like... What the heck? I think this is the control box, that's fine.
What kind of box is this? It comes off on both ends? Yeah, because it holds it, because there's ports on both sides.
So look, we've got a bunch of DVI, VGA, HDMI 1.3, I want to say,
and a bunch of Ethernet, I think it's gigabit. And then on the other side, all the control buttons.
Cool. This seems simple enough. You power it on here and if everything goes wrong, you escape.
Yeah. What do you think of when you think of VGA and DVI?
I think this is pretty old. HDMI 1.3.
Hey, hey, hey, it also has DisplayPort?
Huh? It does. It does.
It's actually only a few years old. The documentation specifies like 2020 or 2021.
And a bigger concern is that LED video world technology has come a long way since then.
And even when this was new, I don't know that Nova Star is a leader in the field.
Sure, sure. Yeah, copyright 2020 ZN Nova Star Tech.
This one is for the all-in-one controller. So this is our VX4S-N.
So this is our controller, not the panels. To be clear, though, I am still freaking stoked.
Oh yeah. That's super cool. Apparently, both the HDMI and the DisplayPort can do up to 4K 60Hz.
That's not 4K. You saw the 3840 and got excited.
Oh, 3840 by 650 too.
Yeah. But you know, if it's really big and it's far away?
All right, let's check out the panels. Should I open this one first?
Yeah, let's do the blue box first. Have you noticed how disgust?
Like, I don't mind filth. But like, all I was doing was like touching the top of the box.
Oh, dude. They're caked in dust.
Why don't we start with the blue one then? Yeah, this one's different.
This has, what, six panels it looks like? And then all the cables.
Whoa, buddy. Yeah, look at all these guys.
I've opened one of these boxes and looked inside to see the panels and get the manual.
That's about it. So I actually haven't even looked at all this stuff.
I didn't open the blue box. I don't know what those little control boards are for.
Is this an Ethernet to XLR? What is it?
Is it just an extra XLR cable? A super duper locking Ethernet.
Wow, that's wild. Does this look like one of them got hot and like melted a bit?
Oh, it kind of does, eh? Yeah, I'm sure it's fine.
Maybe there's just like a single LED on the end that doesn't work. It's okay.
Any idea like how much power this thing dropped? No, absolutely not.
I know basically next to nothing about these, you went and bought something and then dumped it in my lap and said,
Hey, let's make a video. And so here we are. I had like an hour to read through some of the manuals because there's like six manuals because there's a manual for the control box.
There's a manual for the displays. And I think there's a third one or maybe it's just specs.
Well, I'm having a great time so far. Oh, yeah.
This is great. How heavy is it? How bad is it, Ben?
It's not super heavy, but if it were to fall off something,
I wouldn't trust that to hold it.
Wow. That is not the tightest pixel pitch.
I'll check the manual, but I think it's something like 568 by 328 for the LED array.
Oh, does this just have the specs for a whole bunch of different products?
It's a bunch of different ones. Yeah, hold on. There's more of these.
Okay. User manual for this guy. Here's what they're for.
Indoor concert, award ceremony, celebration meetings, etc.
LTT screwdriver for scale. Hey, I figured out one thing though.
What? We're waiting on the back of each one of the panels.
How much does it... 120 watts each.
Hey, we can do up to 4K if we use Ethernet in.
Well, I mean, 2160. We're short like 80 pixels or so.
Yeah. 2160. What's up with that?
I don't know. That's what Ethernet can do because most of this is actually being set up through Ethernet.
What do you think? Oh, yeah. No, it's Ethernet into the panels.
Yeah. There it is. There's your...
Yeah. So the DVI and the VGA and the HDMI and all that, that's all for like our source and external
monitor to like monitor everything from. Got it.
Stuff like that. Your computer hooking up to it. If we want to be technically correct, the best kind of correct, it's using, you know,
twisted pair, cabling and an RJ45 connector. Yeah.
Bottom row to dead pixel. Yeah.
Yeah, that's kind of a downer, especially when your pixels are like this big.
We've got the mid-row here. Top row. Top row.
And that's bottom row. What is this supposed to... Oh.
Those are just six extra panels and all the cables, I guess. That makes sense. Why wouldn't they have used the extra ones to fix the dead pixels?
I don't know. Okay. Cool.
Okay. I think it's just panels in the rest of these boxes. Let's see how many we've actually got.
10. 10 in that one. Okay.
So it's probably 10, 20, 30. And then there's what?
Six here? Yeah. Okay.
So 36 panels. Well, that precludes doing a 16 by 9 setup. Those are...
Those are A8S. Thank you. These are, I believe...
Why an asshole?
Those are A8S, he says. They're the receiving cards.
They're the receiving cards. Okay. What's a receiving card?
Adopting the exclusive LED image booster technology of NovaStar, it can precisely calibrate
the color gamut and grayscale of the screen and improve the grayscale by 64 times.
Okay. So this is effectively doing the job of what like a scaler would do on a display, except
not doing the scaling or the input, almost like an OSD module that you're interfacing
with. Yep. That's 10 in each one.
You can fit so many displays in this bad boy.
This video is like 10% actually looking at the video wall, 90% him trolling me for this
irresponsible purchase. Who is this bad boy?
Oh! Power supply or something? Power distribution unit.
Oh. This is like what we have at the LAN.
This breaks out your big fat 30 amp, 240 volt to a whole bunch of individual plugs and then
just has breakers on it for safety. We're not done yet though.
Oh, what's in the box? Oh! Whoa!
Not the bottom of the box, that's for sure.
Yeah. Oh! What is it?
Replacement parts. So if you needed to replace the interface plugs on one of the wall panels, it comes with
a little replacement board. Power supply. Oh!
These are power supplies. Oh, okay. The Megmeat switching power supply.
Oh, that's where the unit, that's where that went. With which I have great familiarity.
They actually give you quite a bit of spare parts, eh?
Knowing the way that companies like this work, that's probably in place of a warranty.
Just like back when I'd order containers of products from China, it would be, okay, yeah,
warranty, too hard. Tell you what, we'll just ship you 1% more things.
Sure. 400 cases. And you get an extra 10 or 10.
This should be 440. 440 or 404. Yeah.
The LEDs can be preserved for one year. What?
Open one of these. Come on. We've got lots of extras.
Open one. I think they're a quarter. Oh!
Maybe. Yeah. So each of these, you can actually see the scene.
Each of these I think is four. So this is almost certainly then a quarter of one of those panels and you get five extras.
So we might be able to fix our dead pixels. Yeah.
One of the things that I learned back when I was exploring, possibly getting a video
wall in the first place, is that the way that they wear out, they have much the same issue
of older OLED displays where they wear out very unevenly.
Yeah. When you have a failure and you pop a new panel or partial panel in.
Patchy brightness. Nice. Nice.
And color, too. Well, apparently with the controller, we can adjust that. We can fix that allegedly just based off of the instructions.
Sure. Oh, wow. Bloody.
Super cool. Are there two? Oh, you might have twice as many.
Oh. Yeah. I think they're double stacked.
Oh! So that's not that bad. Okay.
So you have 10 replacement quarter panels and that one is completely missing a thing.
Awesome. If I recall correctly, we do have a 240 volt over here somewhere.
There's various kinds. Oh, you're right. Hold on.
Before we do, can we bend this a little? Well, yeah.
This is my bottom teeth.
But hold on a second. If the output is just 120 volt anyway, then we could just run extension cords from all
over the warehouse and just not care about any of this. All right.
Well, let's get one lit up. So we'll light one up with an extension cable and see how that goes.
Okay. So let's just start plugging things in, I guess. I don't know.
There's a wiring diagram that we're just going to have to follow.
I'm thinking output one. Okay.
Cool. Now I'm thinking plug this into a panel.
That's sure. Yeah. That sounds right.
And then did you get a power cord for the panel? Nope. What do they take?
They take these blue fat boys, I think, or rather, I think one of them is the power
ring and one of them is the power out and I think they're color coded, but I don't know which is which.
This thing is huge, but I mean, I guess you're just going to plug one of them out to power
and then the rest are daisy chain. Yeah. Well, at least a row of them would probably be daisy chain.
Yeah. Oh, but did it just turn on on its own? I don't know.
There's a green. Yeah. Okay.
Still flashing. Oh, we probably have to turn the controllers on. That's probably true.
Yep. Hey, one of our inputs lit up. Do you have an input plugged in?
Well, you've got this Ethernet. Nope. That's an output.
Okay. Cool. Okay.
Do we have a source? Did we just use a laptop? Oh, yeah, bud.
Okay. Oh, it did something. Yeah, it did something on my laptop too.
We detected the source. Ooh, screen settings.
Cabinet row, quantity. Oh, whoa. Hello.
Hey. I went to extend. Dude.
I don't know if the resolution is right, but it's displaying something.
Yeah. Look at that. It's...
It's 1226 p.m. Not very bright. So whatever port we're plugged into is the bottom right.
Yeah. So we've landmarked it now. Okay.
We can configure what it's expecting in terms of the width and the height in this controller
software right here. Yeah. And then we just have to make sure that however we daisy chain it is, however, it's expecting
that to go. It's going to take some foresight and planning and probably...
Things we're not in on for. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
So much. We totally think of things before we... That's what people think when they see this.
So now what? So now what? Well, we have 36.
All right. What do you want to do? What do you want to do?
I want to do like a regular 16 by 9 configuration.
Okay. And then we just watch some regular content on it.
We can game on it. We should be able to. We should be able to plug a computer in.
How would we do 16 by 9 though? We don't have to use all 36 panels.
Yeah. This is really not a lot of panels. What the heck are we doing with this?
Yeah. What do you think about it like that? We could do 8 by 4.
Okay. That would be a 2 by 1. And then we have 4 spare panels.
At 4 high, this would be a considerable size display. Okay.
8 by 4 it is. Let me write that down. 8 by 4 it is.
Let me write that down. How far back do I have to go from this thing before it stops looking like butt cheeks?
This is the worst screen door effect I've ever seen in my life.
Oh my God. I can still see the pixels.
It's still not a perfect like gradient. I mean yeah, but you're the kind of person who owns a display so.
No. Yeah. It's bad.
He never lasts this hard except when I waste money.
This is stupid as f**k.
What the f**k are we going to do with it?
It looks terrible. It's like 1440p like it's not even 4k.
You've got about 14 pixels per inch or something and maybe 25.
He's not done yet. What resolution will that actually be?
I have no idea. Let's check. So what are these?
They're 250 by 250? That seems about right. Something like that.
That's 10. So my 20 ppi was probably pretty close.
Wait no it's way lower than 250 by 250.
What is it? Dude the highest one on here is 96 by 96.
Yeah actually no no no you know what?
This is going to be way more than 64 because this is this is 10.
That's 10? It's probably 128 then. So 10?
Like if that's 10. 20, D, 170, about 180 something I think.
You know what? The 96 by 96 ploof is the panels.
Alright because they're quartered. Why don't we try and figure out the truss a little bit?
What I don't know is if the truss is modular.
I have no idea. I've never used truss at like once in my life.
Those look like the feet. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Pixelate this, pixelate this editor because it's feet.
We kind of have to decide where we're putting this now because I feel like once it's down
it's staying down. Because it's going to be huge. All hands meetings.
Oh you could. We have one coming up. Look how small that TV is there.
That's a tiny TV. That's a tiny TV? Yeah.
It's going to look awful. We're going to have like the announcements and shit on it and it's going to look so bad.
I think it's going to be okay. I'm going to be the contrarian here.
I think it's going to be alright. I'm going to be honest with you. I have no idea if I got a good deal on this or not.
You didn't look up the price? I don't even know how much they cost new. That's great.
In answer to your question, yes. These do extend. Okay.
And they have numbers and standards, 15 cm, 20 cm, oh centimeters, okay, sure.
Why don't we mount a panel to one of the back pieces?
Okay. After this you're going to be in love with truss. You're going to want to put truss everywhere.
Clearly this goes here. That seems right.
And then there's a bunch of hardware in here. 16 pieces.
So there's 16 of these and they look like the bolts that would fit in there.
Oh, does that go underneath? Oh.
Dude, you're not doing up more bolts, are you?
There's so much more hardware. I think this is spacers.
It's spacers. You can't just butt these together. Oh, these guys.
Oh, sure. Sure. Sure.
Sure. Sure. Sure.
Sure. If we can figure out how it goes on here. Sure.
You don't have to remember which way it was up to you. So here's the things you were talking about. Yeah, those are the things I was talking about that they can lock into the other panels and
why not. As for how it attaches to the truss. Mm-hmm.
Wait. It's got to be the clamps. These go on a round thing.
They unpin. Okay. Okay.
And these go on here. Okay. I'm following so far.
Yes. That's as far as I've gotten.
Maybe we can tell from what looks like it's had threads run through it.
I'm thinking. Okay. We just got to look closer at this, I think.
I'm 100% now that these just bolt through the pipes into these.
Yeah. No, totally. I think that's correct.
We just don't have those screws. Yeah. Do we have it?
Oh. Oh. Hey, look at that.
That doesn't show panels going on though. How it goes together. But it does show that we have the feet facing completely the wrong way and this whole thing
would have come down like that if we had done it. We definitely did it wrong.
Okay. Well, you've got to go film a ShortCircuit. I'll look up some videos and look into this and see if we can figure out, one, how to
attach the displays and two, we'll let the Verilys get the truss set up properly.
And then if we have to go buy some bolts from Canadian Tire or something, we'll go buy a
bunch of bolts. Okay. All right. Okay.
See you later. I just came back from lunch. Jamie and David helped me figure out what was going on.
Jamie, please tell the people what you did. I did what Plouffe was unwilling to do and read the manual.
So let's use one of these things and go through two panels and then lock it in place.
That's literally it. So we're going to build out the rest of the truss and then we'll put some panels on.
Yeah.
Okay, we've got our truss set up.
Now what we're pretty sure we do to get these panels attached is you flip back this little
corner lock piece. You get the panels together and then once they're together and they've got this locking mechanism
in place, you then clamp them down to the rest of the truss and like, I didn't really
trust a single clamp, but they're on there pretty good.
Big moment. Three, two, one.
Wait, what? We've only done one row so far.
Okay. I was going to say, I can't be all of them, right?
You know what? I actually kind of like it. It's not bad, eh?
Yeah. And it's not at full brightness right now either. No.
It can go brighter. Yeah. Oh, I found some dead pixels.
This is probably some. Okay. How far back do I have to go for that?
Oh my God. Pretty, pretty far back.
It's eight by one right now. Not a great aspect ratio. We're not 100% sure still, but we do still think it's about 200 by 200 for the pixel
count. But how far back do I have to go for it to look like a somewhat serviceable image?
Probably past the tripod. You know what, dude?
With scaling, it'll be a lot better too. This is going to be pretty cool.
I think so too. Like it's genuinely pretty cool.
Might have been not. 100%. I'm very on board now.
I think especially once we go three more rows high, it's going to be a very legit screen.
This could be cool for like Smash or. Whale land. Whale land.
Yeah. Imagine like a Smash tournament on something like this. It'd be sick.
Well, it might not be responsive enough. Let's see what the latency is like. Let's get the rest of it built and then let's game and watch content on it.
Yeah. Sounds good. Holy crap.
It's glorious. Yeah. It looks way better from back here.
Dude. Oh. Oh.
Wow. Doom Dark Ages could be better.
I agree with you about the whole glory kill thing. That kind of sucks.
But the wall. Dude. This is awesome.
It's, it's not without its flaws.
Nope. I can see some of the scenes. There's some obviously dead pixels.
Yep. But the overall experience is way better than I expected.
I, yeah, I, you know, fully expected to kind of poo poo this thing, but it's been pretty
sick and we're only at 75% brightness right now.
Really? And this is with all of our like lights and stuff, one pointing directly at it.
Yeah. So we could crank it up a little bit. I'm not saying it's going to get like, you know, like 200 nits brighter, but yeah, it'll
get better than this. And also the weird jitteriness, that's just the mouse being used on like a sofa.
That's not the screen tearing weirdly or anything like that. That's just, it's weird.
This is awesome. I noticed we're running a pretty mid GPU.
Are we really getting performance on the table? Nah.
This is less than 720p. No. Yeah.
We'll check. No. It doesn't look like less than 720.
Look at the text on the bottom there. For that shirt. Nope.
That's more pixels than 720p. Oh, you're right.
You just got um, actually, we have way more pixels, sort of, um, a few more pixels.
Not many more. Some more. The screen quality, you know what it reminds me of?
It reminds me of like old rear projection TVs. Yeah.
It's not super bright. It's probably a scale thing. I was so much smaller because I was a child when rear projection TVs were a thing.
So they looked huge to me and I'm bigger now and the TV is bigger.
So I think it's all just kind of scaled up. Here, I'm going to turn the brightness up.
That's a good idea. Dooms a little bit of a dark game. You might say it's a dark age.
All right.
That's a hundred. It does look brighter.
It is brighter. Yeah. The contrast is actually not bad.
It's not great, but it's not terrible. It's not terrible.
That's a big advantage of LED walls or of the upcoming micro LED technology that hopefully
will someday make its way into consumer sales. I don't think that's ever happening.
Is that like OLEDs, they are a self-emissive display.
So there is no backlight that's shining through a black pixel, so to speak.
Instead, your black is dictated by how dark the empty space on the panel is around the
emitting LED. So the darker we can get this room, the more contrast we can get out of our display.
In fact, can we lose that one as well? Wow.
Dude. Okay, this is pretty cool.
The only problem with this is that it doesn't exist in a vacuum.
This is super cool and honestly, I don't even feel like it was a bad deal.
I paid less for my TV at home. This is bigger.
We're at 179 inches diagonally.
That is bigger. That's huge.
But yeah, in terms of like literally everything else, your TV at home is better and it doesn't
need truss. The not needing truss is a major factor, however, the installation of my TV at home is a little
specialized. But for me, the bigger thing, the bigger difference is that my TV at home is 4K.
If I want a more immersive image like this, I could just sit closer to it.
100%. Whereas this one, yeah, I could sit closer, but I don't really want to.
David found some of the retina information for me. Guess the PPI of your display, of your video wall in this configuration.
Uh, 15. It's single digit.
No. It's 9.68 PPI and you'd need an average distance of 355 inches, like 30 feet away.
It's pretty far. It looks not bad. No, it's pretty good.
And you know what? It's not amazing, but if we were playing a single player game or something, this would
be totally fine. I could, I could play like an RPG on this thing and it'd be all right.
I'm willing to bet this is 75 to 80 milliseconds.
There would be no reason for me to have this over a 65 inch TV, but I do think we'll have
uses for it. Okay. I think we can use it for training and based on how good it looks from that distance,
this is going to be freaking awesome for the stage at Whaleland.
Oh yeah, it'd be really cool. Even like four player Mario Kart, cause each quadrant is like a 65 inch TV.
Not exactly. I'm just like, look at it and eyeballing it, but like, you know, that's like, that's
a whole TV right there. I think the latency is honestly too crappy for us to play real games on it.
So we have those Epson projectors that I'd probably rather use for that, but if we were
like playing stage games or announcing winners, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, or if we had like,
we wanted to have like an exhibition match or something on the big screen, this is the
one I'd wanted. Yeah. Or even if like, let's say you did a big, you know, WAN Show again, like a live WAN Show.
This could be the second screen that's for like the audience that's too far away to see
you guys. That'd be so cool. Okay, fine.
There's a lot of uses for it. I don't think you've wasted your money.
Yes. Yeah. And if I did, I could get it back from our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video, why not go check out the last time I installed a giant
TV at my house. And it turns out that having the modular like this is a major advantage in terms of portability.
Yeah, that was a big TV. It was big.
I sense has a new one coming. It's even bigger.