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Index › Programming Questions & Help › Programs › Driving a "Video Wall" in P5
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Driving a "Video Wall" in P5? (Read 836 times)
Alterscape
Driving a "Video Wall" in P5?
Jan 21st, 2007, 7:07pm  
I have an idea for an installation piece based around the idea of a "video wall" built from commodity hardware -- old CRTs driven by linux boxen, I suspect.  I'd like to create software with the ability to fragment the output of a P5 sketch across several displays.  Ideally, the "wall" would consist of 16 displays in a 4x4 grid, with each 2x2 set driven by a single machine with multiple video cards.  The content to be displayed would be about 50/50 pre-recorded video and live-generated 2d graphics. Ideally, I'd like to incorporate live video from a webcam connected to an additional machine into the mix.

I'm not sure if the solution would involve generating the video on one (higher-end) PC and then splitting the stream 16 ways across a network for output, or feeding data to the display PCs and having them generate the content more or less in sync.  Which is likely to yield better results?

Is it even realistic to drive something like this with P5? I've never tackled anything like it, but I'm familiar with java and P5 so it seems like a logical place to start..
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mflux
Re: Driving a "Video Wall" in P5?
Reply #1 - Feb 9th, 2007, 10:56am  
Hello there

I'm working on something using eight monitors right now (four video cards) and we tried many different technqiues.

Stretching one processing app to eight monitors is very taxing (to one video card) and the pixel cutting between video cards will often kill the framerate.

The only good solution would be to write one app that can be executed multiple times, and then somehow sync them together. To give you some ideas: you can sync the apps with the system clock, or you can drive the apps with a server to sync data together. We chose the latter solution and it works out okay.

So long as you have one processing app that goes over two monitors (both handled by the same video card) you will get some decent performance.
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