Signal Splitters for Videowall-type Setups?

TwoHeadsAin'tGoodEnough asks: "For our current contract, my company needs to find video splitters which don't just replicate the same signal across all monitors. Googling isn't helping too much, because thousands of people are selling video splitters, but they're all the wrong kind. We need to split a signal onto 4 displays. (Each display is going to be a 52" plasma screen, *drool*). It doesn't matter whether we are splitting analog vga output or dvi output, so long as it works. Any suggestions?" These type of setups are commonly called "videowalls", and there is a library out there called VWLib that can be used to manipulate such systems. Some videowalls are custom affairs, but I'm sure there are commercial entites out there that build complete setups. Have any of you tried to put something like this together? If so, what were your experiences? Update: 03/12 9:15pm EDT by C :After digging thru the Slashdot Archives, this story was found that might also shed some light on the subject.

Comments

VW

[orangesquid]

A little googling yielded Video Cam Inc., Media Technologies, and Unigraf, not to mention others. I found searching for videowall products was more productive than just searching for videowall (no pun intended).

Oh, and for God's sake, whatever you do, PLEASE do not use the Goatse man as your test image. Thank you.

Yikes!

[Otter]

Curious about this subject, I searched Googel for "video wall".

If the second hit doesn't mention the movie "Weapons of Ass Destruction", you've got your settings configured differently from mine...

What have you got so far?

[ObviousGuy]

Is the only thing holding you up this piece of hardware?

Folsom Research makes such a thing

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

http://www.folsom.com/ Check out the BlendPro

More information

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I'm the poster of this article. I should have specified more requirements, but I didn't want to risk being too prolix.

Our application is a realtime 3d visualisation, running on high end graphics cards. Interactive frame rates are important.

Originally, we needed to display the 3d visualization on the top two monitors, and various charts/graphs on the bottom two. The client now wants the visualization to be fullscreen, with the charts/graphics popping up on request.

Currently, we have a geforce4 ti 4600 for the top two monitors, and two geforce 2 mx cards, 1 for each bottom monitor (this is the best card we could find for pci connection, allowing all the cards to be in the system).

We are required to use Windows, or I would just run a separate X display for each head, and probably be happy.

Using DirectX 9, we cannot control multiple heads on multiple cards in fullscreen simultaneously. At the GDC last week we spoke directly with Nvidia and they said it was impossible, "basically due to a DirectX issue".

We can bring up windowed (not fullscreen) displays on each monitor, and the current solution is to just "fake" fullscreen by setting the display resolutions and stretching a top-level window over each display. Windowed mode isn't as fast as fullscreen mode, however, and the application runs at disappointing speeds (even with the current setup which does simple charts/graphs on the bottom monitors).

It will probably not be acceptable when we try to do the whole shebang on all 4 monitors...

What I would like is to split a 1600x1200 into 4 800x600s, or a 2048x1536 (this is the highest resolution supported on the Nvidia card) into 4 1024x768s.

This would hopefully be a single piece of hardware which can do it automatically. Software solutions are probably not fast enough.

Re:More information

[HughsOnFirst]

You know, if the monitors are video monitors rather than computer graphics displays, then you are stuck with crummy broadcast specs, i.e. 512 lines of video per screen. In that case what you probably want the RGB ComputerWall II http://www.rgb.com/Webpages/prodpgs/cwall.html which is cheap at about $10,000 retail. It accepts computer inputs up to 1280 x 1024 pixels and displays them across a 2x2 array of monitors or projectors

Re:More information

[Zurk]

cant you use ONE high end video card like the nvidia pro series, run it at 2048 x 2048 or some such resolution and use a video splitter with the 4 monitors and use zooming and x/y pan or whatever to display 1/4 of the screen on each of the 4 displays ?
that way you dont need 4 high end video cards, software tricks, hardware or any other crap.

Past Setup

[Keefesis]

A control center I know of uses KVM splitters from NTI http://www.networktechinc.com/. One mouse, one keyboard, four CPU's, four monitors. Can call any screen in the room up on a 72" projection TV.

Extron

[adolf]

Extron is to video gear as Blackbox is to networking gear.

They have something that will do what you want. Dig on their page, or give them a call and talk to one of their reps.

I used to be in that biz

[HughsOnFirst]

You are using the wrong search string

The google string you want is "wall controller"
with the quote marks.
uxga "wall controller"
or
"data wall controller"
or
"video wall controller"
or
"videowall controller"
narrow it down a bit

http://www.rgb.com/Webpages/prodcats/commandapp. ht ml
http://www.christiedigital.com/products/produc ts.a sp?Port=3&ProdPartNo=38-FRC001

Pioneer makes some great monitors for this application

BTW, this stuff is expensive. Thousands a day to rent, and priced for NASA to buy.

Two Dual-Head VGAs ?

[Tux2000]

You asked for VGA or DVI, not for composite video or similar. So please let me ask this: Have you considered using two Dual-Head VGA cards or maybe four Standard VGA cards and the Multi-Monitor Features of X11 or Winddows?

Barco videowalls

[gi-tux]

We have a few clients that have videowalls for Utility Dispatching that use videowalls by Barco. They seem to work very well, have good resolution and simply hook into a VGA output. We have driven them from laptops even on occassion.

I am in no way associated with Barco, I only know of them from mutual customers.

PCI GeForce 4 MX available at TigerDirect

[raygundan]

I noticed that you were limited to GeForce2 MX cards for your second two video cards because you need PCI-- there are GeForce4 MX PCI cards available. Here is a quick link to one of them-- I'm sure there are other variations available. $50 after rebate if you get it by the end of March.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtool s/item-details.asp?sku=E145-1034

Video walls

[Anonymous Coward]

The way I have done videowalls in the past is to use the zoom feature on the plasma screens (most expensive screen have this feature). All you need do is zoom the 4 screens so they are all showing a different quarter of the output screen then you use a standard video splitter to split up the output from 1 computer to the four screens...

high resolution, GL accelerated, tiled display

[ga5in]

Forget splitter. Try a quad head video card, like the Matrox G200. You can drive four plasma display at there native resolution with four Linux workstations, also. Place a graphics card in each with good Linux support, like an NVIDIA 900 XGL, and then use Chromium & DMX to make them one unified X display. http://sourceforge.net/projects/chromium/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/dmx/