You should take a look at info-beamer. It supports displaying video via FFMPEG, you could show browser content via VNC, and the best thing is that you can hot-swap the animation code while it is running. It's a bit like Processing, but much more lightweight.
Out of the box it doesn't solve your array problem, but maybe you can hack something up. For example, you could have a huge virtual display on your control laptop, and show parts of it on the Raspberry Pi's via VNC. Or you could have a "crop" parameter in all your animations, so that every Pi can render a different part (required perfect timing, though).
You should take a look at info-beamer. It supports displaying video via FFMPEG, you could show browser content via VNC, and the best thing is that you can hot-swap the animation code while it is running. It's a bit like Processing, but much more lightweight.
Out of the box it doesn't solve your array problem, but maybe you can hack something up. For example, you could have a huge virtual display on your control laptop, and show parts of it on the Raspberry Pi's via VNC. Or you could have a "crop" parameter in all your animations, so that every Pi can render a different part (required perfect timing, though).
http://info-beamer.org/