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Replace Your Windows With LCD Panels
hoagaboom writes "I had particularly ugly neighbors and a lot of LCD panels laying around, so why not build a
Virtual Window? I really wanted to do full motion video, but PCI bandwidth is standing in my way. So with multiple PCIE vid cards, any suggestions on how to split a full motion video stream in Linux?"
Seeing as this was slow to load in the mysterious future, here's a coral cache of the link...
After all, you'll be the one having fun jumping through an LCD panel in an emergency.
Of course, the person that originally thought this up knew that, which is why he added fake windows instead of real ones.
If you simply have multiple PCIE cards in the same system, X.ORG and Xinerama will allow you to do this by building a 'desktop' of four screens - you can then playback 'fullscreen' video across all four.
The dual-head functionality of some cards could let you get away with just 2 cards as well.
One drawback is that as far as I know, OpenGL is not implemented in Xinerama yet (not such a worry for video tho).
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Dont burn your house down by rigging this up in a way where 120V power cords are running inside your walls. (I realize the page author does not have this.) If you use 120V wiring inside a wall that is not in an NEC approved manner, and your house burns down, you might be liable.
This includes not being able to have an outlet mounted inside a wall nearby the frame, in a permanently inaccessible location. No, the fact that you can remove drywall to access it does not make it accessible. Now, maybe if the entire frame swung open on recessed hinges to a finished space with a normally mounted outlet, OK. But best ask the inspector.
Many people will say "Ahh but this is low voltage power wiring" so, there isn't much danger. True, for DVI video signalling, but what about powering the backlighting?
But when the voltage is low, the current is high, and the potential is still there to create heat.
For example. You've probably got some big-ass wires carrying 100 amp or 200 amp service into your house. But if you go out to the power pole, you'll see the transformer which feeds your big wires has a extremely tiny wire getting it's power from the overhead lines. At the high voltages of transmission lines, small wires easily carry the small currents. At the low voltages going into your house, big wires carry the larger currents. Whats the same? The amount of power being carried.
So never assume stuffing 12V cords through a wall is safe just because the voltage is so low. How much power is involved?
15" LCD monitors (8x$275.95) - $2207.60
Nvidia Quadro4 PCI video cards (2x$102.00) - $204.00
Windows frames (2x$500?) - $1000.00
Decent computer - $1500.00
Misc. Parts(wires, brackets, etc) - $250.00
Grand estimated total - $5161.60
...and this is probably a low estimate.
Sheesh!! If I have some extra cash I can afford the "good" beer and only hope the view from my window looks better.... must be nice
The hell with the LCD panels, I want to know his ISP!
It's not that complicated to find out... www.hoagy.org resolves as 208.184.121.21 which is is also 208.184.121.21.above.net so from that you should be able to figure out where it's hosted.
Tools like http://samspade.org/ are pretty useful for quickly finding more info on a host/IP address.
I was playing with VideoLAN a week ago, and noticed it has a video filter module called "wall" (this is under WinXP, FWIW) which will split your stream into as many multiple windows as your machine can handle. So, split your video stream into four windows, move each one to its own display, and full-screen them. I haven't played with VLC under Linux, but I'm guessing it has the same options.
Great project, BTW! I've been thinking of doing something like this for a while. Good luck!
Expensive Solution
Cheap Solution.
Distributed Multihead X Project
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
I don't see any mention of her being his girlfriend. The candid photo slyly inserted into the mix implies that this is so, but never says it...
Nice of him to mention her name in the text as well. The picture by itself might have been too subtle.
Your right, but if you look around his site, you can find this pic of her in a bikini top on their trip to Mexico. I am leaning that she is his girlfriend.
Linux O Muerte!
I think the field of view limitations of the LCD would prevent that from being useful anyway.
Simply configure your X server for a multihead configuration -- Ie something like this (this is from my xorg.conf):
Of course you'd have many more Screens, but that's easy. Then in your "ServerFlags" section, simply turn Xinerama on:
And there you go... now next time your run mplayer what you'll have to do is mplayer -fs -screenw [xres] -screenh [yres].
The reason for this is mplayer will default to going fullscreen on one of the heads, but if you explicitly give it geometry it'll do what you want.
There is one other minor problem I found when testing this out... mplayer appears to have a check built in that gives max resolution as 4096x4096. Since you said on your page that the total desktop resolution was only 3072x2048 it seems that'll work fine!
Even if you do go for higher res, you might be able to simply go through the mplayer code and comment out that check? (or who knows it could actually be there for a reason!?) You might also be able to send a message to the developers. I can't see anyone not wanting to help out a project this cool!
Best of luck!
You're gonna be the next Mike Rowe Soft.
Yes it's a good idea. And it's called MOCOVE.
While not an active display, some posters are talking about electrochromic windows, which can be LCDs (though usually not). They are pretty expensive, easily $2,000+ each. I've been wanting them for my living room/home theater, but can't quite justify the $20k investment in windows for my $1,000 projector...
Some swankier clubs have them for bathroom doors which go from translucent (cloudy white) to transparent, as opposed to the 98%/0% transmissive black ones.
Just google for electrochromic.
"Other Days, Other Eyes" (1972) is based on his earlier short story "Light of Other Days" (1966).
I just found out that LCDs are capable of burn-in (the hard way). If you plan on displaying a static image on the window for long periods of time, you might want to blank the screen every so often.
The creative person behind this project also had a similar problem with his neighborhood previously posted here on slashdot.
You can also click on the following link to his cityscape project.
I can't imagine what his neighbors must be like to cause such a tremendous undertaking.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
You can get 2 ReelTime-4 MPEG2 decoder cards in your PC and get 8 channels of video at a time. These cards are made by Visual Circuits http://www.visualcircuits.com/ and they are pretty good, I used them myself. That would solve your problem of having full motion video on 8 screens. Drivers are made only for Win 2K which is donwside, but overall it is very good product if you only need video streaming.
Heh. I wish. The hardware is from dumpster diving.
The mailto address will get obfuscated after the 24 hour Slashdot effect has passed. For now I'm being nice and letting people email me without the trouble.