3D Display Hardware/Software Solution?

Daemon8666 asks: "I've searched for three days with no luck. A client of mine has developed a brand new type of 3D display. To make it work, he needs me to come up with a way to synchronize 3 simultaneous video feeds on one box, and output them to 3 separate devices, as follows: Comp playing Videos A, B, and C in sync, and outputting Video A to Monitor X only, Video B to Monitor Y only, and Video C to monitor Z only. He is currently using 3 off-the-shelf DVD players that he controls with one remote (he pushes play, and all three separate DVDs start together), but he really wants a single-unit solution. Any ideas what hardware/software I should use?"

Multihead X and mplayer

[sig]

Just grab a computer and stick 3 video cards in it. Configure X to run multihead [tldp.org] and then use mplayer [mplayerhq.hu] or xine [sourceforge.net] or totem [hadess.net] to send the videos to your 3 monitors. If you want to be really cool, you could use gstreamer [gstreamer.net] to build a custom app pretty quickly that sent 3 separate video streams to 3 different monitors and kept everything synchronized with a single point of control.

Simultaneous video feeds

[legirons]

You need hardware-synchronised or "genlocked" video cards, which use cables to synchronise the drawing of each frame. Naturally, you will be using 3 graphics cards in 3 graphics computers, with the rest of your application running on one or more additional machines.

Graphics cards which can do this are things like the nVidia Quadro FX3000G - the G stands for genlocking. Yes, they cost more than the normal version.