Can You Use a Raspberry Pi for Digital Signage?

Raspberry Pi digital signage uses a Raspberry Pi single-board computer as the media player behind a screen. The Pi runs Raspberry Pi OS, a version of Linux, plus either a signage player app that connects to a content management system (CMS) or a web browser in full-screen kiosk mode showing a web page or dashboard.

The player app downloads playlists and schedules from the CMS, stores the content locally and plays it on the attached display, just as a commercial signage player does. The Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 each have two micro-HDMI outputs, so one board can drive two screens, and both decode 4K H.265 (HEVC) video in hardware.

The appeal is clear: the boards are inexpensive, draw only a few watts, have a large community and run a wide choice of open-source and commercial signage software. That makes the Pi a popular way to trial signage or run a handful of screens.

A working signage player needs more than the board itself. A typical build includes:

A bare Raspberry Pi board and an industrial signage player can run the same content. The difference is what happens over years of unattended use, in heat, through power cuts and across hundreds of sites.

Raspberry Pi publishes long production commitments for its boards and compute modules, so supply is rarely the problem. The practical differences are storage, power, cooling and mounting, and how much engineering time each site visit costs.

A Raspberry Pi works well for proofs of concept, a few screens in an office, school or café, internal dashboards in a browser and projects where your team is comfortable with Linux. It struggles in a few predictable places.

microSD cards wear out with constant writes from logs and content updates, and a power cut during a write can corrupt them, which is the most common cause of a Pi signage screen failing. Our guide to microSD cards explains endurance grades. The space behind a screen or inside a kiosk is often far warmer than the room, which can push the board into thermal throttling. Micro-HDMI plugs are small and can work loose on screens that are knocked or vibrated, and a board in a plastic case is easy to tamper with in public spaces.

Video is the other check. The Raspberry Pi 5 decodes H.265 in hardware but decodes H.264 in software, so encode signage video in H.265 for smooth 4K playback. Our comparison of H.264 vs H.265 covers the trade-offs.

There is a middle route: the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (CM5) built into a finished signage player. It runs the same Raspberry Pi OS software as a Raspberry Pi 5, but on a carrier board with eMMC storage, full-size connectors, proper power input and a metal housing.

Our digital signage players include a fanless Raspberry Pi CM5 player with dual 4K HDMI, eMMC storage, Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, an RS-232 port for screen control, a 12 V DC input, a hardware watchdog and auto power-on. For Arm projects beyond signage, our Arm SBCs include Rockchip and NXP boards that suit similar builds, and our guide to Arm processors in embedded and industrial systems compares the main families.

We supply Raspberry Pi based and industrial signage players with the operating system and signage software loaded and tested as standard, set to recover automatically after a power cut.