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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."
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.
wouldn't using all those fresnel's kill your viewing angle? I don't think you could view it in a classroom setup, unless given a really long room.
There are those projector hacks where people attach a hood to their tv/monitor, then pass it through a fresnel and onto a surface. If you built 16 mini fresnel rear projectors, I think you'd end up with something like the setup they use in bestbuy, which is like a bunch of rear projection TV's.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
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...