The NGMA site manager referred me to Chennai Biennale Foundation when they needed the same kind of synchronised multi-projector playback for an exhibition. By then I’d started to seriously dislike how much the first version cost. Each NGMA site had been running on full desktop PCs — expensive, noisy, overspecced for what was actually just “play a video file in sync with some peers”. For Chennai Biennale I rebuilt the player on embedded hardware.
The device shrink
I took the sync protocol and video pipeline from NGMA and ported them onto cheap Rockchip ARM TV-box hardware. This required a fair amount of embedded-Linux work — compiling custom kernels, writing the right device trees to expose every display variant the venue had, getting hardware-accelerated video decode working on a chipset the mainline kernel doesn’t warm to by default. A bespoke stripped-down Linux image carried only what the player needed.
The economics
The comparable commercial option was BrightSign, which rents at ~₹10,000 per device per month. My per-device cost landed at ~₹3,000–4,000 (and later, after more optimisation, closer to ₹2,000). That’s not a small delta across an exhibition with many screens.
What it became
The Chennai Biennale players ran for the full three-month exhibition without intervention. The board I’d cut down for that deployment sat on my shelf for almost two years after — until Cinepolis surfaced the problem that turned it into Arzen. Same hardware lineage, same sync philosophy, eventually deployed across thousands of cinema screens.