How to make a video wall?

Question

I want to have a wall of TFT monitors, maybe as many as 10x10, and display a video on the wall.

That means that each monitor should display a part of the video.

Her's a bad ascii art example with only 2x2:

_______ _______
|top   ||top   |
|left  ||right |
======= ========
|bottom||bottom| 
|left  ||right |
-------- ------

Now, either I find a magic piece of hardware which can control many, many monitors, or I need a separate controller at each monitor.

Which is what I am thinking of:

A master, Windows based, PC where I process the video, slicing it up.
I then send each slice to the appropriate micro-controller, one per monitor.
When ready to play the viedo, I send a command only a few bytes to each MCU, which ought to guarantee that they are in synch.

What do you think? Is there a problem there? Is there a better way?

And the two down-votes were because ... ? I really wish the system would force someone to leave a comment when down-voting; at least that would be constructive. — Mawg says reinstate Monica, Feb 16 '12 at 05:33

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 16 '12 at 06:15

To do it with consumer hardware, you'll need a computer with several AMD Radeon HD cards (series 5000 or later) in Crossfire. They support Eyefinity which lets you span the desktop across a grid of monitors. For your purposes, you will want to find the versions of th cards that can output to 6 displays from a single card. I think, though, that the maximum number of supported displays is 24, in quad-Crossfire.

The other option is to use Matrox. They make devices that take a regular video signal and split it to multiple displays. I am not as familiar with this setup, but it has been a common one in the professional field for many years. Unfortunately, I don't know how many displays you can output to, maximum, with this method, but you can look into that yourself easily.

+1 thanks. I will write to tech support of both. I just didn't know where to get started. — Mawg says reinstate Monica, Feb 17 '12 at 02:50

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 16 '12 at 03:11

1

MPlayer playing separate videos, presliced from the master.

answered Feb 16 '12 at 03:11

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

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+1 This sounds good & might well become the answer. Thanks – Mawg says reinstate Monica Feb 16 '12 at 05:32

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 16 '12 at 04:11

1

You can use DisplayLink via USB ports.

edited Feb 16 '12 at 04:11

soandos

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answered Feb 16 '12 at 04:05

poikilotherm

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+1 Thanks. I will get in touch with their tech support. – Mawg says reinstate Monica Feb 17 '12 at 02:50

How to make a video wall?

3 Answers3