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Displays Software Hardware

3D Display Hardware/Software Solution? 27

Posted by Cliff from the innovative-video-ideas dept.
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?"
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3D Display Hardware/Software Solution? More

3D Display Hardware/Software Solution?

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  • Have you looked into SMPTE at all? Google on that, maybe it'll help, just a guess.

  • Multihead X and mplayer (Score:3, Informative)

    by sig ( 9968 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:02PM (#10875713) Homepage
    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.
    • Just grab a computer and stick 3 video cards in it. Configure X to run multihead and then use mplayer or xine or totem to send the videos to your 3 monitors. If you want to be really cool, you could use gstreamer 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.

      You win the prize! -most helpful and insightful post in this thread-
      • You forget that something needs to be solved first.
        How do you keep the 3 different video outputs synchronised ?
        xine (and I think also mplayer) do not support these functions (yet).

        Anyways, this would defenately be the cheapest and probably the best way to solve this problem at the moment.
    • If we've only got to do 3 it's easy. Buy one card. Matrox Parhelia isn't bad for this sort of thing, or they do a range of quad display cards that lack even that much 3D horsepower.
  • Grab a computer with 3 video cards, swictch it into multi-moniter mode, and get the 3 players running, 1 per moniter. Shouldn't be that much of a problem.
  • to troll here or anyting, but dont you think a few pics and a link with extensive description of your scenario would have made it a little bit easier for the intersted audience to give you feedback...

    just a thought you know.
  • dont you think a few pics and a link with extensive description of your scenario would have made it a little bit easier for the intersted audience to give you feedback

    Yes, And easier for me and my engineering buddies to replicate and patent before you can. What are you thinking posting this to /.???
    (I would never do that of course, but I bet theres someone at CompUSA right now picking up some extra hardware to do just that!)

  • Simultaneous video feeds (Score:3, Informative)

    by legirons ( 809082 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @04:19PM (#10876178)
    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.

    • I think that, for the time being, commodity cards, a single computer, and distributed multihead X would be fine. Pro cards that support a perfectly synced video stream might be overkill if this is just a rig used for experimentation: best to start out cheap, get a proof-of-concept, and then go to the big guns later.

      Of course, the one problem is that you'll be stuck with rather slow PCI cards if you want three cards in one computer.

      • (addendum: I don't know what sort of software tools you could use in order to get the video streams synced. I think that'll be the most difficult question to answer. Perhaps VLC or xine can be run in a daemon mode? that way, you could run three instances, one after the other, and when they've loaded themselves and the videos into memory -- which would cause them to be out of sync -- you could send a command to all three to start playing at the same time. On the other hand, the comment a previous poster made
        • You could cheat on this. Have a nice big ramdrive, preload the videos, start 3 Xine instances - each pointing at a video file but not set to play - then once all three have started, tell them to start playing.

          Since the files are on ramdisk delay should be negligable between the 3 instances as far as startup...

  • 2. ??? (Score:2)

    by Eil ( 82413 )

    I wonder if he had planned to profit from this innovative idea of his before it was posted to slashdot.

  • Extra wide frame (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Descartes ( 124922 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @05:17PM (#10876514) Homepage
    I agree that you should use 3 video cards in one machine, but I think you should make all three videos into one extra wide frame.

    So if it's 640x480 per frame, but squish them all together in a 640x1440 mpeg and let the output display across the three devices. That stops you from having complex software to synch three seperate players.
    • You possibly could get away with 2 video cards. Most of the ones i've bought recently have a VGA and a DVI port... get a dvi to vga converter (or vice versa) and set them up as different displays. You might even be able to use svideo, letting you use just one card, but the quality isn't that great.
  • Ok... here are some ideas.

    First, multiple video streams can be interleaved into a single mpeg transport stream. Each of the streams has its own 33 bit decode/present timestamps, and you can (for this application), ensure that they are synchronized.

    Next, the video output can be gen-locked. One free-running video, and feedback from the DAC to keep the other two video outputs synchronized. There are some chip solutions that can do this, and several board solutions as well. To make this viable, you probably w
  • Just use a beowulf cluster. Around here it seems they can do anything.
  • A client of mine has developed a brand new type of 3D display.

    Yeah, right. I am not saying it is not possible, it very well might be. But when you look back at the history of 3D imagery, patents, methods of viewing, eye-brain trickery, etc - it seems like it all has been done before, in one manner or another.

    Furthermore, none of the prior art, with the exception of true holograms (and perhaps a few of the volumetric 3D display systems), manage to convey true depth where the eye can focus on any one part of

  • Instead of mucking around with multiple video cards, hacking mplayer, or rolling your own system that can control multiple genlockable video cards (i assume you'll need this, using a 3d display) I would recommend going with a dedicated solution such as newtek's video toaster. (Disclaimer - I am in no way affiliated to newtek.)

    VT gives you 4 composite / component outputs, and is capable of handling multiple streams at once. Simply amazing for real-time compositing. (Disclaimer #2: I've never worked for a l

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