LED video walls

ScreenTinker runs on large LED video walls with no special configuration. The LED processor handles the wall geometry and presents itself to the player as an ordinary HDMI display — so a 2808×648 wall is, from here, a screen with an unusual aspect ratio.

Status: community verified. Contributed by Watterott electronic (Leinefelde-Worbis, Germany). Player: Raspberry Pi. Verified: September 2026.

⚠️ This is the one category where streaming sticks do not work

LED walls are built from tiled modules, so the total pixel count is whatever the tile layout adds up to. Thirteen by three modules of 216×216 is 2808×648. That is not a standard display mode, and most Android-based signage players — Fire TV, Google TV Streamer and similar — will only output from a fixed list of resolutions. They cannot drive the wall natively.

A Raspberry Pi or a small x86 PC can output arbitrary modes over HDMI, which is why it is the right player for this category. This is tested, not theoretical: Watterott tried the streaming sticks first.

The signal chain

ScreenTinker player (Raspberry Pi)
        |  HDMI / DVI
        v
LED processor (e.g. Colorlight X4 / X8)
        |  Ethernet
        v
Receiving cards
        |
        v
LED modules

The processor is configured once with the native resolution of the wall. It then advertises that resolution to the player over EDID, and the player picks it up on boot as if a monitor with that native mode had been plugged in. Nothing is configured on the Pi, and ScreenTinker needs no LED-wall feature at all — which is why walls of essentially any geometry already work.

Tested configuration

Native resolution, or let the processor scale

Colorlight processors can crop and scale, so there is a choice:

• Native resolution (recommended). The processor advertises the wall’s exact pixel dimensions and the player outputs to match, so every LED pixel maps to one source pixel. Works with the lower-cost processors.
• Standard resolution, processor scales. Feed it 1080p or 4K and let it crop or scale. This avoids odd resolutions, but costs either sharpness or money: you are no longer driving the native pixel grid, and a 4K-class processor large enough to cover the wall without quality loss costs roughly double.

For most installs, native is better. Design content to the wall’s actual dimensions in ScreenTinker and skip the scaler — a multi-zone layout built at the wall’s real aspect ratio beats stretching a 16:9 design across it.

Off hours

Set a default image at device level — black, or anything else. It appears automatically whenever no playlist is selected or a schedule has left a gap, so a wall goes dark outside opening hours without building a black image into the timetable. If you want the wall to physically power down rather than show black, that is a separate job for the processor.

What ScreenTinker does not control

Brightness, colour calibration and gamma belong to the LED processor and the receiving cards. We send the picture; the processor decides how hard to drive the diodes. Content designed on a monitor often looks blown out on a wall at full brightness — prefer bright type on a dark background over the reverse.

Remote checking is worth setting up: Raspberry Pi Connect’s screen sharing lets you confirm the output is right without standing in front of the wall, which matters when it is outdoors or on scaffolding.

Credits

Thanks to Watterott electronic for the configuration details, the labwc cursor fix contributed upstream, and permission to document this setup.