Building a Video Wall out of Old Laptops? 52
alphakappa asks: "I am interested in building a video wall as a personal project using recycled old laptops so that I can make use of the display controllers that are already present. Is there free or cheap software that can extend the display on Windows and still be capable of showing different videos on different zones (like, say run a video in one zone while showing a powerpoint presentation in another one) What tools would you use?"
It will look like crap in any case (Score:3, Insightful)
yes, yes, I am a troll for mentioning all this, blah blah blah
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steve
Projector (Score:5, Informative)
As I said, buy a projector for $600, plug it in and enjoy.
Dan East
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Apple
The Projector bulbs (Score:4, Informative)
1. Build you own projector, and spec a better cheaper bulb that lasts longer
2. Buy something like the LumenLab Evo [lumenlab.com] which takes $30 bulbs that are supposed to last 6000 hours.
I went with option 2 because I'm a lazy bastard. While there are better projectors with higher resolution, for now (I graduate in 3 weeks) it was worth every penny and then some.
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All of this is for the 1.0. The 1.1 might not have this (they seem to have cut a lot of features)
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Also, since the res is 16:9 - and low at that, I wouldn't have a use for it in a panel display setting. Maybe for something like a conference room or showing movies, but with the
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The 1.0 isn't 16:9. Its 15:9 or 16:10 or something weird like that. I always use 4:3 mode anyway. Its good enough for movies, and its the best TV I ever had. I have a hard time looking at smaller TV's now, even when they are generall
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Practicality (Score:3, Informative)
MaxiVista might be what you are looking for (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Linux would be more flexible, yes, but not when you're trying to get old displays working as fast as possible, along with builtin networking or even wireless, without h
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An alternative (Score:3, Informative)
Then you have a server that throws X applications onto the laptop displays where you will get just about any look&feel you like.
OK, it's crude and may require some work. The laptops may never be a really good solution anyway. Also consider the cost of additional hardware involved and you may be better off with a good projector or "standard" flat-screen LCD:s connected to a single computer with multiple graphic cards where you stretch the desktop to cover multiple monitors.
It's possible to run multiple monitors under both Linux and Windows without any problems.
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XDMX (Score:2, Informative)
one large X display. Worked really well. The screen was huge - 3x3 17" laptop screens adds up to a big display. The downside? You have to have a dedicated switch to handle the traffic, (because there is a LOT of traffic - even when moving the mouse the switch goes bonkers). Also, it's slow. Much slower than an individual display, but good for displaying static images.
Once I had it setup I didn't use
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For me, Windows Media Player seems to crash if you run it on a multiple graphics card/multiple monitor setup. All other video playback was questionable depending on if it used WMP to play back or not. YMMV, but it didn't work that well for me.
Interesting project idea... (Score:3, Interesting)
Another poster has mentioned a projector. This is certainly the more sensible option, but for a funky project for its own sake, I'll assume that you just want to go with the laptop wall anyway.
First off, don't try to do this with Windows. It'll work very poorly. As for playing videos, you can ssh into each laptop and run mplayer locally to get any gioven laptop playing a video. For multilaptop video playback, you will need to make yourself some scripts that will log into each laptop and run mplayer using appropriate cropping options on the video so that only a portion of it is played full screen on any given laptop. You may also want to check out VLC's network streaming options. You will need quite a bit of bandwidth. I sometimes have issues playing high bit rate video files over my 100 Mb network with just a switch between the client and server, and no other significant traffic. You will also want to avoid any HD. If you are going to build something for playing serious high bit rate HD across 9 or 12 different systems, you don't need to ask slashdot how to do it.
Past that, you probably want to write some additional scripts to do things like randomly show your favorite online scenic web cams, give weather reports, show traffic conditions. But, you are creating custom hardware, so don't look off the shelf for that sort of thing. You pretty much have to roll your own, because there isn't any standard plug and play interface for video walls.
Good luck.
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I used to have a lag issue when i was using a Belkin router - however, now that i switched to (begrudgingly)a Linksys, i've had ZERO streaming-related hiccups.
Now, im not so sure about the feasability of streaming it across more than 10 or 15 laptops - but an upgrade to a gigabit network would almost certainly solve the pr
Re:Laptomused as monitor (Score:1)
Seeking the same answer for Macintosh platform (Score:1)
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Mirrors!! (Score:2)
My first though so far was to use mirrors - reflect the display off a mirror kind of like what they do in some of the arcade games. This lets the displ
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software you might check out (Score:2, Interesting)
Take a look at HIPerWall (Score:2)
No, it's not what your looking for, just interesting and informative regarding the technical problems.
HIPerWall [uci.edu] is a 200 Megapixel display, based on 50 Apple 30" Cinema Displays driven by 25 Dual G5 PowerMacs plus one controller. It's a project at the University of California to explore very high resolution displays. HIPerWall is short for Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall. The PowerMacs are connected and act as one large display, allowing even video to be split over the whole area. The main
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Yes, I could buy a projector for a thousand or two, but that will still only give me 1.3MP, maybe 2MP if I get a really good one. For the price of a high-end projector I can probably get 4 LCD monitors with some moderate hardware to run them, and end up with a 5MP display that's much brighter and sharper than a projector can e
problem (Score:1)
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GGI (Score:2)
So, you're doing it because it would be kinda cool. Have a play with GGI [ggi-project.org]. It's a portable graphics layer with various targets implemented. e.g. there are kernel targets for various graphics cards, a Windows target, a VNC target, etc.
What'll interest you is the display-tile target, which is a
3 x 3 wall of monitors with 3 computers, X & L (Score:1)
The base of his system was a 3 shelf display rack with casters. It is a common commercial shelving unit.
On the cart he put 3 rows of 3 CRT monitors. Each row of 3 monitors was driven by a salvaged pentium class computer, and each computer had 3 video cards. The video cards pick up an
Easy, use DMX. (Score:2)
yuck (Score:2)
This has been done before... (Score:1)