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?"

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/ [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/ [sourceforge.net] Though if you just want to control all the computers from one place, then synergy should work.

Interesting project idea...

[forkazoo]

Well, you will need to mount the whole laptop to the wall, and run power and network to each laptop. Each laptop will look a bit different, and laptop displays really aren't meant to be running 24/7, so plan on replacing the laptops with some frequency. That means that the physical build aspect of a project like this won't be insignificant to make it all work smoothly, look nice, be easy to maintain, etc.

Another poster has mentioned a projector. This is certainly the more sensible option, but for a funky project for its own sake, I'll assume that you just want to go with the laptop wall anyway.

First off, don't try to do this with Windows. It'll work very poorly. As for playing videos, you can ssh into each laptop and run mplayer locally to get any gioven laptop playing a video. For multilaptop video playback, you will need to make yourself some scripts that will log into each laptop and run mplayer using appropriate cropping options on the video so that only a portion of it is played full screen on any given laptop. You may also want to check out VLC's network streaming options. You will need quite a bit of bandwidth. I sometimes have issues playing high bit rate video files over my 100 Mb network with just a switch between the client and server, and no other significant traffic. You will also want to avoid any HD. If you are going to build something for playing serious high bit rate HD across 9 or 12 different systems, you don't need to ask slashdot how to do it.

Past that, you probably want to write some additional scripts to do things like randomly show your favorite online scenic web cams, give weather reports, show traffic conditions. But, you are creating custom hardware, so don't look off the shelf for that sort of thing. You pretty much have to roll your own, because there isn't any standard plug and play interface for video walls.

Good luck.

software you might check out

[sunji.roaoul]

http://puredata.org/ [puredata.org], and it's library http://gem.iem.at/ [gem.iem.at] could be run on the laptop array. Building a laptop hierarchy: 1 laptop recieves the whole 1024*768 and GEM slices four 512*384 screen displays and serves them to a 2*2 grid of laptops on display. or, if you have 21 laptops, you can make a 16 laptop laptop display wall wall. The trick is farming low resolution chunks to the slower machines. The final 4*4 laptop wall only has to have a combined resolution of 1024*768, right? You're not going to get highdef out of this wall.

Re:Projector

[prefect42]

If you're merely looking to upscale, the bandwidth isn't a killer. Multicast/Broadcast the video and play it back with vlc, and it'll do the tiling for you. You just need a bunch of machines running vlc.