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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.
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.
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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.
You are using the wrong search string
. ht mlc ts.a sp?Port=3&ProdPartNo=38-FRC001
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
http://www.christiedigital.com/products/produ
Pioneer makes some great monitors for this application
BTW, this stuff is expensive. Thousands a day to rent, and priced for NASA to buy.