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Making A Videowall
Ur@eus writes "Zeeshan Ali Khattak has made a videowall using Red Hat Linux, GStreamer and commodity hardware. The solution was made based on the need to create a flexible and cheap solution for use in Pakistani Schools and Universities using commodity hardware. To find out how this was done and some more details, and of course some cool pictures, check out the Video Whale project homepage."
Great idea, looks good... but in most video walls you have to allow for the space between each monitor when you crop, or reduce the physical space between each. Here, there's way too much space between each screen (both vertically and horizontally) and the images look strange because the cropping doesn't allow for it.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
...but not really, I'd rather just get a projector.
at least they're showing a good movie on it :))
this sig has intentionally been left blank
A video wall seems extremely cool but uniquely useless, especially for a school in Pakistan. Can anyone tell me why this wall was built? The only use I can think of is to play Super Smash Bros: Melee. Oh, and the cropping needs work.
starving children aplenty, uneducated masses, and violence over religious differences, and they're messing with redhat to watch The Matrix. Way to utilize those funds!
and they have access to nukes!!
God help us
It seems that four computers with four pci videocards would cost about the same as one computer with 4 Matrox G200 MMS Quadhead videocards ($699). You would not need all kinds of software distributing the videosource over four computers and it would make administrating and moving the whole system much easier.
It would be cheaper to use a projector.
And too much space between the screens.
Hmmm. 16 x 17" monitors @ $200.00 each is $3200.00... Hell, even if they were only $100.00 each you can get a very nice projector for less which will blow away the functionality of this system.
The whole idea behind a video wall is that you can display the same, different, or transitional information across the monitors. They (the monitors) can be ganged together for a single display, split into sub-displays, or data can be moving across them. The system that they describe has very limited use and will not be able to do what a videowall is meant to do.
Videowalls are quickly being killed these days by projectors except in the instance where you have limited installation depth and do not have room for the minimum throw of the projector. Or I guess where the ambient light is too high but even then you would want non-glare screens on your video wall for the same reason and the lamps in projectors are getting quite bright these days.
Even if you take into account the annual cost of lamps for the projectors you would have to balance this out against the maintentance cost in parts and man hours of the system he has built. bet it works out pretty close.. Just getting all 16 monitors to calibrate equally is going to be a nightmare.
16 Debbies doing Dallas, or maybe 4, or heck even one giant Debbie filling my living room!
Absolutely pointless.
Someone needs to trim the edges around those monitors with a chainsaw.
I bet its a pirated version of the Matrix too.
Can I watch my Duran Duran videos on it while I puff up my hair?
What's next? A vacuum tube computer!? Running Linux?
How dare you defile my video wall! Montag! MONTAG! /. fools down.
Burn these
I'll trade you one S3 card for 4 of those monitors :-) Yessirree these cards are expensive here heh heh
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
...but that thing looks *terrible*. There's just way too much space between the screens.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
For god sakes man
take those monitors out
of their cases. Put
Them closer together and
kill the funky spacing.
Any movie watched on that wall will make it a funnyp ic07.jp g
comedy. I mean, just watch the head on this dude!
http://www.gstreamer.net/apps/vw/vw_files/
"...When the aliens invaded!!"
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
is that they don't give much instruction for how to recreate their project.
Practicality issues aside, this would be a fun project fo duplicate.
LCDs may cost more than CRTs, but they are far lighter, use less power and the gap between the edges would be much less. You could salvage LCDs from old laptops.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Now, how about a projectorwall instead? That is something I would like to see. 16 projectors would make a hell of a screen ;)
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
Porn might look interesting on it.
Don't forget: this stuff is for the wealthiest 5%. The rest of the population occupies itself with eking out a living.
Jeebus Cripes! These guys whip up a Cool Hack(tm) with scrounged materials, make it work and add to the collective abilities of Gstreamer and all you have to say is 'it looks crappy'.
What a bunch of hypocrites. The fact that the monitors can be swapped out after a proof of concept, and that you've got the power of four CPU's available (Beo-mumble) is completely lost on you guys.
And I've figured there'd be at least ONE MPAA crack from somebody.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Sorry but is it better to lie and say it looks great or tell the man straight that it looks shit and it needs more work ?
by using LCD projectors instead of monitors. You can either throw the screen onto a wall or have a rear-projection setup. With the LCD projectors and a little patience you can make the images sit next to each other perfectly and give the illusion of a monstrous desktop.
"No Comm, No Bomb"
Eat me!
Makes you wonder what Hillary will do to her interns...
Anyway, I'd like to congratulate Slashdotters on actually reading the article for a change, and not flooding this story with remarks about MPAA chasing after violaters, Pakistan being slightly out of their jurisdiction, as well as that of many US laws brought in thanks to the MPAA.
Contrast with the recent Ask Slashdot about openning a movie cafe in Bolivia, where the comments were utterly comical, especially the 'Gee, thanks a lot, people, but I'm in BOLIVIA' from the original poster.
One cannot help but wonder if that was the work of one monomaniac with two dozen accounts doing it as a joke.
You'd almost think a 'net company would know
the need to create a flexible and cheap solution for use in Pakistani Schools and Universities using commodity hardware
I just can't believe this is cost-effective for more than a 4-screen display. With quality video projectors costing less than $2-3000 USD, this solution doesn't save much money, and is far less convenient in terms of portability - how would you even move around an 8x8 grid of monitors -, which would seem to be key for application in schools and universities. Also, the whole array is visually distracting due to the breaks between the monitors.
Sometimes people get distracted by technology and forget about the constraints of the problem to be solved.
God-bless-you!
Wire this thing poorly and you might just get yourself a Firewall.
I have seen several notes deriding the spaces between the displays. The "fixes" suggested for this include using LCDs (which I suspect are outside of the budget), or disassembling the monitors and bringing the CRTs closer together. (anyone want to discuss the safty issues of pulling one of the center displays out to replace it?)
I suspect it would be far cheaper, to use fresnel lenses in front of the CRT's with modifications to the rack they built to center the CRT on the fresnel, and mask off the power light for the monitor.
Will it be perfect? No, but I think it will be more flexiable.
-Rusty
You never know...
1) Why did they need a videowall in the first place? What is the point?
2) Why use a video wall, when a Projector would be much more clean and efficient? Even if the ambient light was high or the didn't want people blocking the path, they could rig things so the projector is behind the screen in a dark room. Lack of throw area can be compensated for through use of mirrors to reflect the path....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Applying the Fresnel lense hack discussed some time ago could make the screens merge more successfully.
Now I'll pull out all your pubic hairs!
Maybe all the a**holes posting are totally feeling f**ked by the corrupt m$ ruling of yesterday and need to take it out on the someone. Naaaagh... they're just a**holes.
I for one find this hack exciting because it demos the power of OS. In a place where they have to bust their asses to find pci cards and their monitors are too valuable to remove from their cases. It's just a demo folks. And they did it in Pakistan. Not Redmond.
"Don't Follow Leaders." Bob Dylan
But if you do happen to be an asshole, Islam gives you just the right excuse to act on it.
You can twist Christianity to provide you with an excuse, too, but Christianity takes a lot more twisting. Don't forget that Muhammad always ordered prisoners of war massacred -- usually the entire male population of any place he conquered, and he spent his entire life conquering places, too. Christians have done similar things, but Jesus gave them specific instructions in the Bible. Muhammad did provide such instructions. Islam has a model for their ideal Earthly society, and that model is a medeival version of Stalin's purges. And it's all right there in the Qu'ran. Jesus said to turn the other cheek; Muhammad said "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out." There's a lot of good stuff in the Qu'ran, too, but one of the major axioms of the Islamo-fascist faith is that the only perfect society the world has ever seen was the Islamic world during Muhammad's life and a couple of decades afterward. Their explicit goal is to recreate that society in every detail. Think about that. Think about it long and hard.
And don't be so stupid as to blame Bush for a recession that simply arrived on schedule; the tech boom years were bound to crash. Any idiot could see that. It was made worse by all the hyper-Libertarian anti-regulation ideology (presided over by a Democrat), but who voted for it? Who voted for the Congress that made the laws? Who kept on voting for them after the laws were passed? The voters, stupid. If you hire a moron to fix your car, it's your own damn fault when he breaks it.
Heh heh heh, sorry 'bout that...
No, white folks just run the country and fuck the economy with his cronies.
Actually, this group represents only a small minority of the population. The remaining are partitioned by 'asset' or 'liability'. As they say, "Cattle and leeches."
an openmosix cluster of these?
I bet you thought I was going to say something else. Ha!
Zing! Got you. *licks his finger and touches you* ssssss....
It's kind of nifty that any Joe can do this, but one of the things I see these types of video walls being able to do is to change the arrangement and utilization of the 16 monitors, so that one second you might have a 4x4 video stream, and the next you might have a 2x2 stream in the center with some other type of content elsewhere, or a 3x4 stream with 4 1x1 screens of other information, that sort of thing. If there was an easy way to define these types of "programs", independently of the video stream(s), that might make these things a little more fun to play with.
This is for Pakistani schools?? What a crock. Meanwhile, American schools are using old 15" televisions from the 1970's in stuffy classrooms filled with 45 children. If the school even has a television or two to share with all classrooms in the entire school.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
As the man stated on his webpage, they are focusing their search on PCI videocards; specifically accepting videocards based on the S3Virge/DX chipset. Sure, they could purchase one overhead display, or two, but perhaps they want the functionality of a CRT. There may also be other projects involved such as clustering+Xinerama and/or chromium, I wouldn't doubt their intellect. There are obviously fewer projectors in Pakistan than there are PCI videocards and CRT's. I only hope people stop cursing and dis-respecting their intellect based on the actions of their opposite angry half of the population of Pakistan. We can say the same about our country in funding education. I'm happy they are doing well with what they got out of this sad world.
Enough of that movie already. Get over it.
No Funding! I think the point that people are missing here is that the project does not have a budget. There is no money to spend on a video projector. The entire system relies on hardware which is, on a regular basis, serving an entirely different purpose. This solution allows them to create a large display when it is necessary, out of components at hand. Almost any computer lab can generate a 4' x 5' display on demand.
Also, what is the effective resolution of such a screen? It sounds remarkably similar to the IBM ultra high resolution LCD we heard about a while back.
Spurious
This is a great engineering story, of folks working with what they have, and a great Free Software story - they could have tried some pirated copy of commerical software, but instead they decided to use open source components, stretching what is possible. Could it have been done with a projector? Sure, if one was availible. But now the state of multi-monitor free software has been advanced a little, which may benefit you or me some day.
I hope that there were some other people who saw how cool this was, who are contacting the authors with useful suggestions about removing the shells and mounting the tubes closer together, that are looking at the GStreamer source and thinking about how to add cropping, and how to make cropping easy, and hopefully a few people that are thinking about donating equipment, and realizing how lucky they are to live in a world where you can order a projector from Amazon and have it delivered in days.
Yes, for this particular application I feel that a projector would be better utilized, but there is another cool way this could be used. By using just two screens you could watch a letterbox movie! That is something you could try at home, with just two video cards. Get a couple of 19" monitors, remove the cases, put them close together, and viola, your own wide screen high resolution monitor...
What, me worry?
I don't want to take credit away from this proyect (I already have it archived into my "cool video hacks" category), but I think in this particular case it would be cheaper, simpler, faster to setup, smaller, and more convenient to simply use a DLP-based video proyector with a high lumens value (plus you could get a much larger image with better image quality as freebies).
If you notice, the Vide Whale is only about 6 feet high, and it suffers from a software problem which is basically not cropping the areas between the monitors (makes it look pretty bad). So, why not the DLP solution? I'm pretty sure they can get something decent for about 3,000 dollars, which I bet is way cheaper than the price of all the machines, video cards, monitors, and cables combined (not to mention the time saved when setting it up and the costs saved in transportation).
I implemented a quite similar feature in VLC one year ago. See this or this.
God, root, what is difference ?
If you want to make a huge screen out of many smaller ones take the tubes out of the cabinets and get them closer together or find monitors with smaller bezels. I think they make monitors designed for those video walls in mind. Hate to say it but the picture sucks!
OTHO for the right application, it is a clever hack.
As you can see, we've had our eye on you for some time now, Mr. Khattak. It seems that you've been living two lives. In one life, you're Zeeshan Ali Khattak, program writer for a respectable software company, you have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias Zak147 and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for.
One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. I'm going to be as forthcoming as I can be, Mr. Anderson. You're here because we need your help.
We know that you've been contacted by a certain individual, a man who calls himself umer_pk. Now whatever you think you know about this man is irrelevant. He is considered by many authorities to be the most dangerous man alive. My colleagues believe that I am wasting my time with you but I believe that you wish to do the right thing. We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start and all that we're asking in return is THAT YOU CLEAN THIS FRIGGIN MESS UP AND BUY A BIG SCREEN TV!
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
Ok, maybe twice that resolution for an HDTV resolution in smaller sizes, but this would be good for say on 8x12 screen. They would have to be $10-50 per tile to be really worthwhile, but even a bit more than this would be competetive with current large flat panels, but you need to get down to the lower end of this to make it really popular. The big if would be whether it looks just as good as a one-piece design.
Looks like they cant get those silly plastic bags off monitor cables in pakistan either.
I dunno, how about anywhere you might want to do a bit of high tech / glam PR ...industry conventions, sales shows, University open days, art galleries - hey, the kind of places people hire this kit for in Europe or USA.... What a thought.
I agree it seems a bit of overkill for a school, but why not the above reasons?
.As for why do it, do you really think justification is required for a tech project on /. ? Seems a damn sight better use of tech than stuffing a computer into a rotting vegetable (halloween jack-o-computer). This guy might get a bit of a business out of it as well.
The vid wall solution is much brighter than a projector could be on any screen. A better option if lighting isn't entirely controllable in the viewing area.(think trade show booth, lecture theater where there is a demonstration involved, outdoors)
On the other hand, it's a pretty cool thing to do 'just because you can'.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
don't repace this thing with a video projector...hook it up to 16 of 'em. C'mon a video wall of 100'x100' with a resolution of 4096x3072...now that's a video wall 8-]
a ... BEOWULF cluster of THESE!!! ... yeah.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
You can leave the laptop lcd's still attached to the laptops and allow the laptops to control the screen. You can get decent enough laptops on ebay for less than the cost of a new video card and monitor.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
What are they going to call a wall from the video whale project -- the Whaling Wall?
They should get a viswall.
http://www.visbox.com
I would tend to agree. I hear a lot about how Islam is a "religion of peace", but nothing from the Muslims that would support this. I am therefore forced to assume that Islam sucks, unless proven otherwise.
I found an old S3-Virge-DX card (and some older cards I wasn't sure about) in my spares box and emailed them asking if they'd like it, here's the response (I removed extraneous bits that don't apply, like his mailing address!):
:) Yes please, we really need :)
Hello,
Thank you for sending a positive comment, we have
been waiting for one
them bad, but afaik old Trio64 are not Xv supported by
the XFree86 drivers. Did you test them? Well if you
can send us any PCI vga card on earth that could do Xv
using the XFree86 drivers, just send us plz. uptill
now you are the only one who offered us & the 2nd one
with a positive comment
WTF?!?
Am I the only person who actually read the article and thought about helping out?
C'mon y'all...
Very impressive. All you schmucks who are drooling on and on with your anti-Islam, anti-Pakistani statements are really pissing me off. These guys basically took monitors and video cards that would normally be consigned to dumpsters here and turning them into a pretty amazing video wall. So, they have yet to put the guts of the monitors into cases that would allow closer placement of the CRTs. Big whoop. That's just a matter of time and materials. Any idiot can physically mod a case, be it a PC case or a CRT case.
Props for a very cool experiment, guys. Don't let the trolls grind you down.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Hello, Let me answer all the queries in one reply cause i see a lot queries asking the same questions again and again.
:)
(1) About the Need for schools/universities: Well, its quite obvius that the price of our video-wall is not less than the commercially available projectors. but for that possibility every school/college shall HAVE to buy a projector of course. But many of the schools/universities have a lab of atleast 16 computers networked together. So we can arrange them such a configuration that will allow them to make a video-wall within some minutes when ever they need to.
(2) About the cropping: Oh we only needed to change 4 config files for that and we fix this one a day after we took the pictures.
(3) About taking the gap out: we've thought much on that matter, like taking out the monitors out of their cases. we tried all that but that didnt matter at all. And if you look at the screen from the distance its intended to be kept from the audience, the effect of those gaps reduces significantly. Trust me on this
(4) About terrorism: well, i can only say that being a member of an open-source community, i know the value of Freedom...
Totally true what you are saying.
__
Sig: Marine Stock Photos
Is this correct? Are you from Pakistan?
I tried to see if I could get a package to Pakistan. With a bit of research, I found a page for the North West Frontier Province Primary Education Project (NWFP-PEP), based in Peshawar, Pakistan. However, that website does not have a postal code as required by UPS. Is this a sign that they don't make regular deliveries there? FedEx did not require a postal code, and they claimed they could get a 4ftx4ftx4ft, 50lb box to Peshawar for only $316.43.
So, hardware from the U.S. may be a little expensive. But you think that the Pakistan hardware market would be cheaper?
Now, I imagine software piracy is pretty widespread - Microsoft Windows and Office are probably availible for the cost of a CD, and a Matrix DVD made it's way to Pakistan. But multi-monitor video is a pretty narrow application, usually provided by the vendor of a multi-head graphics card. It would probably be eaiser to get Linux tools to do the job than to try to get a pirated copy. Plus, I'm not sure what their internet connectivity is - they seem to have the basics (a yahoo email account), but I'd expect at least one of the people to have a University email account. The website is hosted on the gstreamer website, not in Pakistan.
Please enlighten me how they would get the needed software and extra montors for $30-40 USD each.
The man in black was shooting bill clinton's projection on a cave wall? Now these terrorists are going to destroy the monitors when they fire at pictures of peace loving americans!! Are these fuckers getting dumber or what?
The effect of the flaw on the images in the article is obvious. The images look stretched out or "exploded" instead of contiguous, because this naive implementation doesn't discard the portions of the image that would logically fall between the monitors.
While it may seem wrong to cut out parts of the image, our brains are great at filling in gaps, and it would have looked perfectly natural.
There've been times in history when the Islamic world was pretty darn civilized. So, okay, yeah, this is maybe not one of those times. Certainly the worst wingnuts get all the publicity, too. But there are sane people in the Islamic world -- some of them seriously respectable Islamic scholars -- who are saying as loud and often as they can that terrorism is bullshit, that killing civilians is just plain wrong (and the Qu'ran does happen to back them up on that point, BTW; the militants are doing all kinds of theological backflips to get around the prohibition on killing civilians. It's interesting to note that Western leftists find it very easy to "justify" deliberate and systematic war crimes in terms of their values (as long as the war criminals have "third world credibility"), while for Muslims it takes real ingenuity (but they're still doing it, all the same)). Those voices are being ignored or drowned out, but they're there (equivalent voices of reason are totally absent among Western leftists, of course). They're not having any influence on most Muslim governments, but they are indeed out there. Furthermore, most Muslims in the world are not out killing people. Some approve of terrorism (more than I wish), some don't.
So let's be fair. Even if the religion were just plain pure evil (and I doubt that), not all of the people are even close to pure evil.
While I'm not sure of this things usefullness, I'm glad someone is trying new things in the 'old country' just for the sake of doing them. I'm also glad there was cooperation between a dude who just had an idea and another who decided to put some money behind it. Comments about "other problems such as dirty streets and violence and oh-my-god-this-could-be-used-for-nuclear-weapons." By that idiotic logic, all the American (private or public) money going into research about nano-technology, space exploration, faster computer chips should be stopped untill Joe Hobo I saw on a street in New York is given a home a shiny new Ford. These professional complainers don't realize that more often than not, it is people with ....ah fuck it, this comment will get modded down anyway.
Matrox G450MMS, G200MMS, G100MMS (which I own) and the older Appian cards have a dedicated GPU and dedicated memory per chip. Matrox has never sold multiple GPU cards on AGP.
It is easier to build a multiple GPU card with PCI because PCI is a bus. Each GPU can be seen as a separate device on that bus. Second advantage is that you can indeed use more than one card in the system.
AGP is a port, and I only know of one manufacturer that has made multiple GPU cards for this bus. They use the "Appian/B1 agp bridge" in it's Jeronimo 2000 card to pull that of.
Other multihead cards can use AGP without such a bridge because they have only a single GPU connected to multiple ramdacs (e.g. the Matrox's G450, G550, Parhelia; Nvidia's twinhead geforces; Ati's dual monitor radion's).
A quick note about the new Appian cards. Dualhead Appian cards are made with a single ATI Radeon VE chip and are available in AGP and PCI. Quadhead cards feature two of these Radeons and are only available on PCI.
One promising concept that I came up with right away was that you could
manufacture personal air bags, then get a law passed requiring that they be
installed on congressmen to keep them from taking trips. Let's say your
congressman was trying to travel to Paris to do a fact-finding study on how
the French government handles diseases transmitted by sherbet. Just when he
got to the plane, his mandatory air bag, strapped around his waist, would
inflate -- FWWAAAAAAPPPP -- thus rendering him too large to fit through the
plane door. It could also be rigged to inflate whenever the congressman
proposed a law. ("Mr. Speaker, people ask me, why should October be
designated as Cuticle Inspection Month? And I answer that FWWAAAAAAPPPP.")
This would save millions of dollars, so I have no doubt that the public
would violently support a law requiring airbags on congressmen. The problem
is that your potential market is very small: there are only around 500
members of Congress, and some of them, such as House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil,
are already too large to fit on normal aircraft.
-- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants"
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