One small box. Any screen. Total control.
The VDN Node Abstract turns any HDMI display — a meeting-room TV, a stadium video wall, a hotel lobby projector, a hospitality menu board — into a remote, mode-driven canvas owned by the VenueVue Control System.

A VDN Node is a small, headless appliance that plugs into a display over HDMI and connects to the network. Once adopted by vvu-cs (VenueVue Control System), the screen behind it becomes a blank canvas — a remote-driven surface that can be sliced, layered, themed, animated and re-purposed on demand without anyone touching the device.

It is the last-mile rendering endpoint of the VenueVue platform:

• vvu-cs decides what should be on every screen, when, and for whom.
• vdn-server routes those decisions out over secure WebSockets.
• VDN Node does the actual rendering — pixels, audio, animation, hardware-accelerated video, web content and display control.

There is no fixed “mode” baked into the device. The same VDN Node can be an IPTV decoder this morning, a corporate signage screen at lunch, a 4-up sports video wall in the afternoon, and a parabolic theater-stage projection in the evening — all driven from vvu-cs.

Traditional AV deployments lock each screen to a single function: this TV is the menu board, that projector is the boardroom HDMI, that panel is the signage loop. Changing roles means re-cabling, re-licensing, or sending a tech.

VDN Nodes collapse all of those roles into one software-defined endpoint:

• Any source, any time. IPTV, SAT>IP, RTSP, local files, web pages, cameras, KVM-shared desktops — switchable from a control panel or a scheduled rule.
• Any layout. Tiles, full-screen, picture-in-picture, multi-window composition, animated transitions, theater-mode parabolic projection.
• Any branding. Backgrounds, overlays, status text, scrolling tickers, identify badges — all themable per venue, per zone, per event.
• Centrally managed. Configuration, firmware, container image, certificates and logs are pushed from vvu-cs. No on-site reflashing.

The VDN Node ships with no fixed application. On boot it shows a logo, waits for adoption, and then opens a single full-screen Wayland surface that the control system uses as a compositor of its own.

Every visual element on screen is a tile: a placed, sized, animated widget that vvu-cs can create, move, restyle or remove at any moment over a WebSocket connection.

Tiles can be combined, layered, faded, animated in/out, and composited together. The same canvas might hold a 4-up video wall, a corner logo, a scrolling ticker, and a half-screen browser dashboard — all live, all independently controllable.

The VDN Node is intentionally stateless about purpose. Modes are configurations applied to the canvas from the control system:

• Signage Mode — image/video playlists, scheduled content, branding overlays.
• IPTV Mode — channel grid, EPG-driven tuning, MPTS program selection, multicast/SAT>IP joining, hardware-accelerated decode.
• Video Wall Mode — multi-tile composition with synchronised sources across one or many nodes.
• Boardroom / KVM Mode — share a remote desktop with mouse/keyboard injection, switch HDMI inputs, drive the projector and screen down.
• Hospitality Mode — background music, menu boards, dynamic content for guest-facing spaces.
• Live Event / Theater Mode — parabolic curved projection, animated scenic content, projector cues triggered from vvu-cs.
• Streaming Mode — capture the HDMI canvas itself and re-publish it as a low-latency WebRTC stream (via Janus) for remote viewing.

A node is never configured for one of these — it is told to be one of these, and can change in seconds.

The Abstract is the standard VDN Node, built on the Rockchip RK3588 SoC (8-core ARM, Mali-G610 GPU, Rockchip MPP video engine).

Highlights of the rendering stack:

• Zero-copy video via DMA-BUF / EGLImage import. Decoded frames are handed straight from the RK3588 video engine to the GPU without a CPU round-trip.
• Hardware decode for H.264 / HEVC / MPEG-2 / VP8 / VP9 / AV1 via Rockchip MPP.
• Adaptive codec probing with caching, so live IPTV streams switch decoders without dropping the channel.
• Multicast aware — joins UDP multicast groups directly, including MPTS streams with program-number selection.
• Subtitles — SRT, WebVTT, ASS, DVB-Sub bitmap and Teletext, rendered through libass with full styling.
• Transparent surfaces — the canvas is ARGB end-to-end, so overlays can blend with external HDMI sources passed through the compositor.
• Low power, fan-less — passively cooled ARM platform suitable for behind-screen and in-wall mounting.

For installations that require multi 4K output, NVIDIA-class GPU compositing, or extreme tile counts,

The same node also drives the room’s audio:

• AES67 professional audio over IP support.
• HDMI Audio output
• Analog 3.5mm Line Output
• Per-tile volume, ducking, and source switching driven by vvu-cs.

A VDN Node is more than a screen — it is a node on the venue’s control network. Out of the box it speaks to:

• CEC — power, input switching and volume on HDMI-CEC televisions.
• PJLink — projector power, shutter, source and lamp status.
• KVM — mouse/keyboard injection into shared desktops over LAN.
• HDMI capture & WebRTC — re-publish the on-screen canvas as a low-latency stream for remote viewing or recording.

Every node is fully managed from vvu-cs. No on-site touch is required for:

• Adoption — a fresh node displays an adoption code and waits to be claimed by an organisation.
• Container self-update — vvu-cs pushes a new image tag, the node pulls it from the private registry and recreates itself in-place, with variant-guard to prevent cross-flashing wrong hardware.
• Configuration push — display modes, transforms, EDID hints, output resolution and layout are sent as live config updates.
• Firmware update — host OS / kernel package updates orchestrated from the cloud.
• Identify / Locate — flash an on-screen badge to physically find a device on a wall of TVs.
• Health & status — heartbeat, RSS, thread counts, decoder state, player lifecycle and lifecycle telemetry streamed back to vvu-cs.
• Factory reset / reboot / log retrieval — full remote ops.

• All control traffic runs over authenticated WebSockets to vvu-cs.
• Devices are tied to an organisation at adoption time; no cross-organisation command leakage.
• Container images are pulled from a private registry with optional on-prem root CA injection.
• Per-device session tokens with MAC-address pre-approval lists.

A single venue may run dozens of VDN Nodes — every menu board, every back-of-house monitor, every bar TV, every projector — and every one of them is a generic canvas awaiting instructions from the same control system.

A VDN Node is not a TV box.
It is a programmable display surface — a blank canvas at the edge of the venue, owned and orchestrated by the VenueVue Control System. Whatever a screen needs to be, whenever it needs to be it, the VDN Node Abstract becomes — without anyone walking into the room.