Building a Video Wall out of Old Laptops?

alphakappa asks: "I am interested in building a video wall as a personal project using recycled old laptops so that I can make use of the display controllers that are already present. Is there free or cheap software that can extend the display on Windows and still be capable of showing different videos on different zones (like, say run a video in one zone while showing a powerpoint presentation in another one) What tools would you use?"

Comments

It will look like crap in any case

[Gothmolly]

Each old recycled laptop will have a different color scheme, brightness and viewing angle. DSTN vs. TFT, relative strength or weakness of the backlight, etc.

yes, yes, I am a troll for mentioning all this, blah blah blah

Projector

[Dan East]

Buy a projector for $1000 and be done with it. The display controller is part of the motherboard, so you would need the entire laptop, not just the display. Thus the power consumption would quickly increase since you're powering entire laptops. Also, the lead length between the panel and the onboard controller must be very short - just a couple inches. So the bulk of the laptop will have to be mounted right with the panel. The displays will look significantly different - particularly with respect to white (some will have a yellow tint, others a blue tint), If you sit down and add up the bandwidth - full motion video at say 1024x768, times however many laptops you're driving, equals a crapload of bandwidth. We're talking gigabit requirements. If these are old salvaged laptops then you'll be lucky if they even have 100Base-T.

As I said, buy a projector for $600, plug it in and enjoy.

Dan East

Practicality

[cephalien]

This really doesn't seem feasible, unless you have some serious hardware engineering prowess. What it seems like you want to do is span the laptop video on multiple monitors? If you want to do this with 'external' displays, then the problem is spanning across those individual laptops. With network access, you might be able to fudge something with VNC (although, don't expect great speed on that). Otherwise, I'd say probably not. From what I know, most of those art displays using regular PCs/monitors used specialized software or particular effects not available in a standard configuration to do what they do.

MaxiVista might be what you are looking for

[Hard_Rock_2]

I've not used it myself, but some friends have and it worked pretty well. http://www.maxivista.com/ Also perhaps you could bug the synergy team (this is an open source project), although I don't think this feature is something that will be implemented anytime soon... http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ Though if you just want to control all the computers from one place, then synergy should work.

Windows?

[Simon80]

Why would it be a requirement that the software has to run on Windows if you're using the laptops sole ly as displays? Even if you'd like to use the display with Windows, the laptops would be able to run whatever you like.

The Projector bulbs

[dj245]

The major cost of projectors is in the bulbs. A $600 projector that takes $300 bulbs that only last maybe 2000 hours is no fun. When you have the $300 bulb on your mind you get really stingy about turning the TV off all the time. To get around this, there are about two solutions.

1. Build you own projector, and spec a better cheaper bulb that lasts longer
2. Buy something like the LumenLab Evo which takes $30 bulbs that are supposed to last 6000 hours.

I went with option 2 because I'm a lazy bastard. While there are better projectors with higher resolution, for now (I graduate in 3 weeks) it was worth every penny and then some.