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Hardware

Making A Videowall 163

Posted by michael from the one-is-not-enough dept.
Ur@eus writes "Zeeshan Ali Khattak has made a videowall using Red Hat Linux, GStreamer and commodity hardware. The solution was made based on the need to create a flexible and cheap solution for use in Pakistani Schools and Universities using commodity hardware. To find out how this was done and some more details, and of course some cool pictures, check out the Video Whale project homepage."
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Making A Videowall More

Making A Videowall

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  • Cropping needs improving (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fruey ( 563914 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @07:27AM (#4583404) Homepage Journal
    Great idea, looks good... but in most video walls you have to allow for the space between each monitor when you crop, or reduce the physical space between each. Here, there's way too much space between each screen (both vertically and horizontally) and the images look strange because the cropping doesn't allow for it.
    • Exactly my first thought when I saw the pictures. Why don't they just get rid of the monitor cases, so they can put the tubes closer together and make one huge box for the lot?
      • Weird, my first thought when I saw this was a computer and 20 video cards is cheaper than a computer and a projector?
        • Sorry, 20 video cards/monitors.
          • It is, if you've already got 20 video cards and monitors ... and that will be true for most schools.
            • Yeah, 20 video cards / monitors, a tech person to install the 20 video cards monitors linux box with the software, a rack to hold the 20 monitors, the willingness to break some expensive monitors if you slip up setting up the monitors, and the costs incurred by not being able to use those 20 monitors that they were hooked up too, until they all get set back up. Still, doesn't seem worth it.
        • The vid wall solution is much brighter than a projector could be on any screen. A better option if lighting isn't entirely controllable in the viewing area.(think trade show booth, lecture theater where there is a demonstration involved, outdoors)

          On the other hand, it's a pretty cool thing to do 'just because you can'.
        • The article mentions the fact that just getting the PCI video cards took 3 months, and they have no spares - Pakistan doesn't have a whole lot of old parts from the sounds of things.

          Perhaps it is impossible/prohibitively expensive for this school to get an LCD projector? In which case this could be a good solution.

    • Re:Cropping needs improving (Score:4, Interesting)

      by helmutjd ( 568988 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @07:38AM (#4583422)
      I think in this case they would've been better off with a different brand/type of monitor altogether... those ones have far too much plastic trim around them. Cropping that much out of the movie would really kill the image, and the only other alternative would be to remove all the monitors from their mouldings to get 'em closer together (not fun). Sweet project, though.
    • I suppose a quick fix would be to either physically adjust the monitor controls to make them overscan by a couple of inches in each axis, or set up the X servers to do this. Probably wouldn't help the lifespan of the monitors though I guess...
    • I know Xinerama has support for overlapping parts of screens already, they probably have support for leaving gaps, too.

  • well, (Score:2, Funny)

    by sirius_bbr ( 562544 )
    at least they're showing a good movie on it :))

  • Why? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Omkar ( 618823 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @07:38AM (#4583420) Homepage Journal
    A video wall seems extremely cool but uniquely useless, especially for a school in Pakistan. Can anyone tell me why this wall was built? The only use I can think of is to play Super Smash Bros: Melee. Oh, and the cropping needs work.

    • Re:Why? (Score:2, Funny)

      by hovik ( 257174 )
      Simulating nuclear explosions. Great way to visualize it, and it's probably a big fad in Pakistan these days.

    • Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by davey_darling ( 590598 )
      My first thought was that something like this could be a fairly low buck way to set up a cool video display at a nightclub or party..

      You could gather any old mismatched monitors and throw them up on a wall somewhere, hell, even just stack 'em on top of each other and strap 'em together for that cool 'arty' look...

      I'm sure there have been many art exhibits that have done similar things before. (you know the ones, they usually highlight the terrible things that television has done to our society and whatnot) Now you can do it too!

      Hell, it's a few days late, but I'm sure you could whip up a pretty spooky halloween display with this thing.. Show a creepy movie on displays scattered about the place, instant kinda high-tech terror..

    • I dunno, how about anywhere you might want to do a bit of high tech / glam PR ...industry conventions, sales shows, University open days, art galleries - hey, the kind of places people hire this kit for in Europe or USA.... What a thought.


      I agree it seems a bit of overkill for a school, but why not the above reasons?

      .

      As for why do it, do you really think justification is required for a tech project on /. ? Seems a damn sight better use of tech than stuffing a computer into a rotting vegetable (halloween jack-o-computer). This guy might get a bit of a business out of it as well.


    • More importantly, what will they call it? (Score:4, Funny)

      by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @02:56PM (#4584870)
      What are they going to call a wall from the video whale project -- the Whaling Wall?

  • funny (Score:2, Troll)

    by Anonymous Coward
    starving children aplenty, uneducated masses, and violence over religious differences, and they're messing with redhat to watch The Matrix. Way to utilize those funds!
    • you forgot to mention nuke's.

      armament budgets tend to be so big for developing countries that if they could just dump 'em they would be able to feed 'most' of the people.

      kewl project though, and totally peaceful.. props for them of that.

      • Re:funny (Score:2, Insightful)

        by dytin ( 517293 )
        This is way offtopic, but just to let you know there already is enough money to feed everyone in the world. There is plenty of food to feed everyone. The problem is not a lack of money, it is the systems that are set up in third world countries. When food donations come poring in, the dictators take such a large proportion before it is distributed that the people pretty much don't get any of the original donation. Even if all of the armament budgets in the world were stopped, and all of the money donated to starving poeple, there would still be world hunger, because of the damn dictators.

    • Re:funny (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      what a crap comment! I guess you're only allowed to do hacks if you happen to live in a perfectly functioning society? the other day everyone is says how cool it is that a guy puts a mobo in a pumpkin-- but people shouldn't be messing with a little hack for a video wall in the third world?? WTF?

    • starving children aplenty, uneducated masses, and violence over religious differences, and they're messing with redhat to watch The Matrix. Way to utilize those funds!

      Well if it bothers you so much why don't you sell your computer, and donate the funds to end world hunger. I see two really good outcomes from this.

      1. You get to feel good about doing something to fix the problem, rather than just point at others and asking them why they aren't fixing it.
      2. We don't have to read you retarded comments any more.
    • Shit man we're talking about Pakistan here, not the U.S....

  • Wouldn't four quadheads be more usefull (Score:5, Interesting)

    by baschie ( 453563 ) <bhuisman&sci,kun,nl> on Saturday November 02, 2002 @07:46AM (#4583434) Homepage
    It seems that four computers with four pci videocards would cost about the same as one computer with 4 Matrox G200 MMS Quadhead videocards ($699). You would not need all kinds of software distributing the videosource over four computers and it would make administrating and moving the whole system much easier.

    • Re:Wouldn't four quadheads be more usefull (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @08:17AM (#4583485) Homepage Journal
      But what about the bandwidth issues? Will the PCI bus handle 16 video streams flowing through it (e.g. a movie, as the wall in the article shows) ?
      • I don't know what resolution they are using for the video display, but they are using the XVideo extention.. which means they are probably using hardware pixel scaling.. if you send a 160x120 (1/4 of a 640x480 stream) at 32bit color depth, you get 4.4 megabytesy per second. with 60 frames per second.

        if you want to send a full 640x480 image to each display, you would need 70.3 megabytes/sec.

        32bit/33mhz PCI is 133MB/sec.. so they are probably taking advantange of the XVideo hardware scaling.

        you also have to take into consideration the network bandwith used to push the video into each box.

        my only question is.. what bit depth are they using.. and how does that affect the PCI bandwidth used.
      • He's not pushing 16 video streams through. He's really only pushing 4, minus the 1 that is on the system that is streaming. He has 4 systems running the 1/4 of the wall each. 1 of the systems is the server so it doesn't need to stream it's own 1/4. The other 3 are using Xinerama to give it the appearence of being the height of 4 monitors so it isn't streaming 4 monitors worth of data per system.
      • Well, why don't you think about it a little bit first? You've got about 100MB/sec (800Mb/sec) available for the cards. Divide by 2 bits per pixel gives 400Mpixels. Divide by 16 monitors and you've got 5Mpixels per monitor. Even at a resolution of 2048x1536, that's only 3 Mpixels per monitor. Repeating our calculation at 32 bits per pixel, we get 200Mpixels, or 2.5M per monitor, about 1800x1440 resolution.

        So yes, there is plenty of bandwidth.
    • 4 Quad heads would be easier (bandwidth, admin, moving, & computing), but as he mentioned in the article: getting ANY video cards was difficult let alone Quad head cards.

  • Why? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It would be cheaper to use a projector.
    And too much space between the screens.

  • 16 monitors vs projector (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02, 2002 @07:55AM (#4583447)
    Hmmm. 16 x 17" monitors @ $200.00 each is $3200.00... Hell, even if they were only $100.00 each you can get a very nice projector for less which will blow away the functionality of this system.

    The whole idea behind a video wall is that you can display the same, different, or transitional information across the monitors. They (the monitors) can be ganged together for a single display, split into sub-displays, or data can be moving across them. The system that they describe has very limited use and will not be able to do what a videowall is meant to do.

    Videowalls are quickly being killed these days by projectors except in the instance where you have limited installation depth and do not have room for the minimum throw of the projector. Or I guess where the ambient light is too high but even then you would want non-glare screens on your video wall for the same reason and the lamps in projectors are getting quite bright these days.

    Even if you take into account the annual cost of lamps for the projectors you would have to balance this out against the maintentance cost in parts and man hours of the system he has built. bet it works out pretty close.. Just getting all 16 monitors to calibrate equally is going to be a nightmare.

    • Re:16 monitors vs projector (Score:4, Funny)

      by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @08:55AM (#4583553) Homepage
      Ok, what if they used a cluster of 16 projectors? ;-)
      • Oh you mean something like this [anl.gov]. As they'll tell you, it's not as easy as you think. Most commercial projects don't color balance with each other all that well because well, they don't need to. Plus there is need to do some funky stuff with fading around the edges. ANL also has a MicroMural and MicroMural2. The MicroMural2 is pretty impressive to see a full screen hi-res video running on. They've done a good job of making the projecters blend together.

        The other issue is the noise and heat that LCD projectors make. Which is pretty significant.
    • Actually part of the plan as I understood it is actually just to use the normal computers of the school computer lab and just quickly assemble the videowall from those when needed.
    • I've had this idea of a while that you could "tile" a large flat screen monitor from standard low res flat panels. With existing tech, you could do way better than this project by finding the cheapest low res LCD monitors, and either find a model with narrow edge trim, or remount the screens to get minimal spacing. Of course, this is lame if the screens aren't cheap enough, and who really wants a big screen with visible lines between tiles. What I wonder is, whether it is possible to design a module and mounting method that eliminates the lines completely. Maybe have modules that butt right up to each other (maybe even connect together, but I digress), and then have a single piece glass in front, possibly with a difusion surface to help merge the pixels. For big screens, even with high res, the actual pixels could be pretty big, so you could have 1'x1' module with say a 20 dot per inch pitch for 240x240 pixels.

      Ok, maybe twice that resolution for an HDTV resolution in smaller sizes, but this would be good for say on 8x12 screen. They would have to be $10-50 per tile to be really worthwhile, but even a bit more than this would be competetive with current large flat panels, but you need to get down to the lower end of this to make it really popular. The big if would be whether it looks just as good as a one-piece design.

  • Imagine the possibilties... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...for porn!

    16 Debbies doing Dallas, or maybe 4, or heck even one giant Debbie filling my living room!

  • WOW! A VIDEOWALL!!! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Can I watch my Duran Duran videos on it while I puff up my hair?
    What's next? A vacuum tube computer!? Running Linux?

  • Er, no offense... (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 )
    ...but that thing looks *terrible*. There's just way too much space between the screens.

    - A.P.

  • simulated (Score:5, Funny)

    by SubtleNuance ( 184325 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @08:30AM (#4583513) Journal
    For god sakes man

    take those monitors out

    of their cases. Put

    Them closer together and

    kill the funky spacing.

  • Any movie watched on that wall will make it a funny
    comedy. I mean, just watch the head on this dude!
    http://www.gstreamer.net/apps/vw/vw_files/p ic07.jp g

    "...When the aliens invaded!!"
  • is that they don't give much instruction for how to recreate their project.

    Practicality issues aside, this would be a fun project fo duplicate.
  • LCDs may cost more than CRTs, but they are far lighter, use less power and the gap between the edges would be much less. You could salvage LCDs from old laptops.

    • Re:Why not use old LCDs? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by kubla2000 ( 218039 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @09:14AM (#4583576) Homepage

      You could salvage LCDs from old laptops.

      Not so easily done: http://www.eio.com/lcdconnect.htm [eio.com] as far as I can tell, you'd have to get into some pretty heavy-duty electronics and buy convertor cards to handle the different input expected by a laptop display from that which is delivered by a vga card.


      • You can leave the laptop lcd's still attached to the laptops and allow the laptops to control the screen. You can get decent enough laptops on ebay for less than the cost of a new video card and monitor.
    • ..And it would costs abouts $200 a pop to get converter boards to use those LCD monitors on a desktop display. A lot of people assume that it's economically advantageous to use laptop LCD's instead of desktop ones. Typically, it doesn't cost less to use a laptop screen with a desktop, and the only places it makes sense is when you very specifically need like a 12.1" or 8.4" screen in a dash board or control panel. This thread [eio.com] talks about the technical problems associated with laptop screens on the desktop, and these guys [earthlcd.com] carry everything you need to do it. Check it out, it's really expensive, even if you have 16 laptops with identical LCD's.
      • What if they could somehow get 16 laptops and have the laptops be the computers, solve the problem of interfacing the screen, but now you have the problem of finding the 16 laptops, and the fact that inexpensive laptops have small screens.
    • One way do do this with one LCD screen is to take a 15" LCD and a old Overhead projector and build a projector. You may have to have a dark room but it looks awesome. I have built one for my basement Home Theatre and it rocks. A good set of instructions can be found at VG150 LCD Projector [csun.edu].

  • Listen to you! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Matey-O ( 518004 ) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Saturday November 02, 2002 @08:45AM (#4583538) Homepage Journal
    Jeebus Cripes! These guys whip up a Cool Hack(tm) with scrounged materials, make it work and add to the collective abilities of Gstreamer and all you have to say is 'it looks crappy'.

    What a bunch of hypocrites. The fact that the monitors can be swapped out after a proof of concept, and that you've got the power of four CPU's available (Beo-mumble) is completely lost on you guys.

    And I've figured there'd be at least ONE MPAA crack from somebody.

    • Re:Listen to you! (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Dude, welcome to Slashdot. The trolls outnumber the GNU hippies twenty to one. But all that does is prove how superior we hippies are. Jesus, even Taco himself is hell bent on hawking overpiced hardware and modding down anybody who questions the wisdom of $500 gimmicks that will be useless trash a few months down the road.
      Fuck them though. I, like you, appreciate the Pakis efforts. It's the thought that counts.
    • I would have been much more impressed if it were scrounged hardware. The monitors are new...not the plastic on the display cable of most of them still. All in all, if looks like crap, and the cost of parts exceeds a better alternative. I call that a bad idea.
      • Actually, not everyone removes the plastic wrappers that come with new stuff. I have a friend from india who has had a vcr for over 2 years now, and the remote is still in the protective plastic wrapper.
        • A good reason to keep remotes in wrappers is dust. However, it's probably not your friend's reason...
          • Well, i actually talked to him about it, and he mentioned that its really common in india. To the point where if it isn't really getting in the way, why bother taking it off (such as leaving the plastic on the monitor cables).
  • by using LCD projectors instead of monitors. You can either throw the screen onto a wall or have a rear-projection setup. With the LCD projectors and a little patience you can make the images sit next to each other perfectly and give the illusion of a monstrous desktop.

  • Cost-effective ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tmark ( 230091 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @09:10AM (#4583570)
    the need to create a flexible and cheap solution for use in Pakistani Schools and Universities using commodity hardware

    I just can't believe this is cost-effective for more than a 4-screen display. With quality video projectors costing less than $2-3000 USD, this solution doesn't save much money, and is far less convenient in terms of portability - how would you even move around an 8x8 grid of monitors -, which would seem to be key for application in schools and universities. Also, the whole array is visually distracting due to the breaks between the monitors.

    Sometimes people get distracted by technology and forget about the constraints of the problem to be solved.

    • Availability (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As the man stated on his webpage, they are focusing their search on PCI videocards; specifically accepting videocards based on the S3Virge/DX chipset. Sure, they could purchase one overhead display, or two, but perhaps they want the functionality of a CRT. There may also be other projects involved such as clustering+Xinerama and/or chromium, I wouldn't doubt their intellect. There are obviously fewer projectors in Pakistan than there are PCI videocards and CRT's. I only hope people stop cursing and dis-respecting their intellect based on the actions of their opposite angry half of the population of Pakistan. We can say the same about our country in funding education. I'm happy they are doing well with what they got out of this sad world.
    • Don't forget that it's probably easier for them to purchase 16 - 17" monitors than 1 - $3200 projector. The monitors could be used by all students whereas the projector can only be used by one group at a time. After using the video wall, it can be torn down and the monitors given back to the appropriate classroom(s).

      Also, projectors may cost considerably more than here in the US. This project presents a nice easy way to use existing technology the schools may have to do something else. A lot of us don't really have any idea how bad things might be. I've worked for small companies and getting them to purchase big ticket items was like pulling the tooth of an awake tiger.

      --James

  • @#$@ the warl (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nobley ( 598336 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @09:14AM (#4583577) Journal
    Wire this thing poorly and you might just get yourself a Firewall.

  • eliminating the spaces... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @09:20AM (#4583592) Homepage Journal
    I have seen several notes deriding the spaces between the displays. The "fixes" suggested for this include using LCDs (which I suspect are outside of the budget), or disassembling the monitors and bringing the CRTs closer together. (anyone want to discuss the safty issues of pulling one of the center displays out to replace it?)

    I suspect it would be far cheaper, to use fresnel lenses in front of the CRT's with modifications to the rack they built to center the CRT on the fresnel, and mask off the power light for the monitor.

    Will it be perfect? No, but I think it will be more flexiable.

    -Rusty
    • wouldn't using all those fresnel's kill your viewing angle? I don't think you could view it in a classroom setup, unless given a really long room.

      There are those projector hacks where people attach a hood to their tv/monitor, then pass it through a fresnel and onto a surface. If you built 16 mini fresnel rear projectors, I think you'd end up with something like the setup they use in bestbuy, which is like a bunch of rear projection TV's.
  • 1) Why did they need a videowall in the first place? What is the point?

    2) Why use a video wall, when a Projector would be much more clean and efficient? Even if the ambient light was high or the didn't want people blocking the path, they could rig things so the projector is behind the screen in a dark room. Lack of throw area can be compensated for through use of mirrors to reflect the path....
  • Applying the Fresnel lense hack [slashdot.org] discussed some time ago could make the screens merge more successfully.
  • It's kind of nifty that any Joe can do this, but one of the things I see these types of video walls being able to do is to change the arrangement and utilization of the 16 monitors, so that one second you might have a 4x4 video stream, and the next you might have a 2x2 stream in the center with some other type of content elsewhere, or a 3x4 stream with 4 1x1 screens of other information, that sort of thing. If there was an easy way to define these types of "programs", independently of the video stream(s), that might make these things a little more fun to play with.

  • This is for Pakistani schools?? What a crock. Meanwhile, American schools are using old 15" televisions from the 1970's in stuffy classrooms filled with 45 children. If the school even has a television or two to share with all classrooms in the entire school.

    • Y'see, American school jumped on the Micro$oft bandwagon before they did a little elementary arithmetic, and so now there are brand-spanking new WinXP licenses on 15-year old computers in a 75-year old building with no heat or A/C. Oddly enough, there aren't any students either. Oh well...

      Remember, nobody was ever fired for buying Micro$oft! ;-)

  • A creative solution to the problem of... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Spurious Growth ( 591776 ) <miraclerubber.yahoo@com> on Saturday November 02, 2002 @10:49AM (#4583881)
    No Funding! I think the point that people are missing here is that the project does not have a budget. There is no money to spend on a video projector. The entire system relies on hardware which is, on a regular basis, serving an entirely different purpose. This solution allows them to create a large display when it is necessary, out of components at hand. Almost any computer lab can generate a 4' x 5' display on demand.

    Also, what is the effective resolution of such a screen? It sounds remarkably similar to the IBM ultra high resolution LCD we heard about a while back.

    Spurious

  • Once again, did anyone read (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JWhitlock ( 201845 ) <John-WhitlockNO@SPAMieee.org> on Saturday November 02, 2002 @10:54AM (#4583893)
    ...or just look at the pictures. As the author states:
    I rather quick realized that the only extra component we needed in Gstreamer was one that that did the cropping for us. At the same time I also saw that my knowledge about multimedia and GStreamer was not good enough to allow me to write this element. So I tried asking my friend Wim Taymans if he would be willing to take on the task of writing such a plugin. He was kind enough to do that not only because of my need, but also because he saw it as another nice feature of Gstreamer that would be needed by many others.
    So, they know that cropping is a problem. But that's just software (and maybe a bit of hardware, with those huge borders). But that isn't their biggest hardware problem.
    It turned out however that our biggest problem was finding PCI video cards in Pakistan whose XFree86 drivers could do XVideo, this in a situation when its hard to even find PCI video cards at all in the market. Solving this problem of lacking parts took us 3 months and at one point we even considered abondoning the project. We still need more cards because we do not have more than these 16 s3virge/DX cards. If any of the cards stop functioning, we are out of business.
    This isn't the U.S. - it's Pakistan. They can't go to eBay and find a 4-head card, or even pick and chose cards (or even monitors) based on requirements. They have to use what they can find, and I for one am impressed. How many of you would give up if it took three months to just find the hardware?

    This is a great engineering story, of folks working with what they have, and a great Free Software story - they could have tried some pirated copy of commerical software, but instead they decided to use open source components, stretching what is possible. Could it have been done with a projector? Sure, if one was availible. But now the state of multi-monitor free software has been advanced a little, which may benefit you or me some day.

    I hope that there were some other people who saw how cool this was, who are contacting the authors with useful suggestions about removing the shells and mounting the tubes closer together, that are looking at the GStreamer source and thinking about how to add cropping, and how to make cropping easy, and hopefully a few people that are thinking about donating equipment, and realizing how lucky they are to live in a world where you can order a projector from Amazon and have it delivered in days.

    • It is far easier and cheaper to get any software and hardware in Pakistan! As you already know there are no strict laws on piracy so everything is dirt cheap. Also the second monitors should not be more than 30-40 USD per piece. But the point remains the guys did a nice job and put together a nice system.
      • It is far easier and cheaper to get any software and hardware in Pakistan! As you already know there are no strict laws on piracy so everything is dirt cheap. Also the second monitors should not be more than 30-40 USD per piece. But the point remains the guys did a nice job and put together a nice system.

        Is this correct? Are you from Pakistan?

        I tried to see if I could get a package to Pakistan. With a bit of research, I found a page for the North West Frontier Province Primary Education Project (NWFP-PEP) [britishcouncil.org.pk], based in Peshawar, Pakistan [britishcouncil.org.pk]. However, that website does not have a postal code as required by UPS. Is this a sign that they don't make regular deliveries there? FedEx did not require a postal code, and they claimed they could get a 4ftx4ftx4ft, 50lb box to Peshawar for only $316.43.

        So, hardware from the U.S. may be a little expensive. But you think that the Pakistan hardware market would be cheaper?

        Now, I imagine software piracy is pretty widespread - Microsoft Windows and Office are probably availible for the cost of a CD, and a Matrix DVD made it's way to Pakistan. But multi-monitor video is a pretty narrow application, usually provided by the vendor of a multi-head graphics card. It would probably be eaiser to get Linux tools to do the job than to try to get a pirated copy. Plus, I'm not sure what their internet connectivity is - they seem to have the basics (a yahoo email account), but I'd expect at least one of the people to have a University email account. The website is hosted on the gstreamer website, not in Pakistan.

        Please enlighten me how they would get the needed software and extra montors for $30-40 USD each.


        • you can get "any" software for the price of a CD. Presently the govtt. is tightening up the grip on piracy but it is still a long way.

          Monitors-this is second-hand/refurbished stuff that costs really that much. It is mostly sourced from Taiwan and China.

    • Totally true what you are saying.

  • Yes, for this particular application I feel that a projector would be better utilized, but there is another cool way this could be used. By using just two screens you could watch a letterbox movie! That is something you could try at home, with just two video cards. Get a couple of 19" monitors, remove the cases, put them close together, and viola, your own wide screen high resolution monitor...

  • I don't want to take credit away from this proyect (I already have it archived into my "cool video hacks" category), but I think in this particular case it would be cheaper, simpler, faster to setup, smaller, and more convenient to simply use a DLP-based video proyector with a high lumens value (plus you could get a much larger image with better image quality as freebies).

    If you notice, the Vide Whale is only about 6 feet high, and it suffers from a software problem which is basically not cropping the areas between the monitors (makes it look pretty bad). So, why not the DLP solution? I'm pretty sure they can get something decent for about 3,000 dollars, which I bet is way cheaper than the price of all the machines, video cards, monitors, and cables combined (not to mention the time saved when setting it up and the costs saved in transportation).
  • I implemented a quite similar feature in VLC [videolan.org] one year ago. See this [cs.vu.nl] or this [videolan.org].
  • If you want to make a huge screen out of many smaller ones take the tubes out of the cabinets and get them closer together or find monitors with smaller bezels. I think they make monitors designed for those video walls in mind. Hate to say it but the picture sucks!

    OTHO for the right application, it is a clever hack.
  • As you can see, we've had our eye on you for some time now, Mr. Khattak. It seems that you've been living two lives. In one life, you're Zeeshan Ali Khattak, program writer for a respectable software company, you have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias Zak147 and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for.

    One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. I'm going to be as forthcoming as I can be, Mr. Anderson. You're here because we need your help.

    We know that you've been contacted by a certain individual, a man who calls himself umer_pk. Now whatever you think you know about this man is irrelevant. He is considered by many authorities to be the most dangerous man alive. My colleagues believe that I am wasting my time with you but I believe that you wish to do the right thing. We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start and all that we're asking in return is THAT YOU CLEAN THIS FRIGGIN MESS UP AND BUY A BIG SCREEN TV!

  • Damn cable bags (Score:3, Funny)

    by skinfitz ( 564041 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @12:36PM (#4584301) Journal
    Looks like they cant get those silly plastic bags off monitor cables in pakistan either.
  • a ... BEOWULF cluster of THESE!!! ... yeah.
  • Very impressive. All you schmucks who are drooling on and on with your anti-Islam, anti-Pakistani statements are really pissing me off. These guys basically took monitors and video cards that would normally be consigned to dumpsters here and turning them into a pretty amazing video wall. So, they have yet to put the guts of the monitors into cases that would allow closer placement of the CRTs. Big whoop. That's just a matter of time and materials. Any idiot can physically mod a case, be it a PC case or a CRT case.

    Props for a very cool experiment, guys. Don't let the trolls grind you down.

  • Zeeshan Ali replies: (Score:3, Informative)

    by Zeenix ( 622336 ) on Saturday November 02, 2002 @04:39PM (#4585243)
    Hello, Let me answer all the queries in one reply cause i see a lot queries asking the same questions again and again.

    (1) About the Need for schools/universities: Well, its quite obvius that the price of our video-wall is not less than the commercially available projectors. but for that possibility every school/college shall HAVE to buy a projector of course. But many of the schools/universities have a lab of atleast 16 computers networked together. So we can arrange them such a configuration that will allow them to make a video-wall within some minutes when ever they need to.

    (2) About the cropping: Oh we only needed to change 4 config files for that and we fix this one a day after we took the pictures.

    (3) About taking the gap out: we've thought much on that matter, like taking out the monitors out of their cases. we tried all that but that didnt matter at all. And if you look at the screen from the distance its intended to be kept from the audience, the effect of those gaps reduces significantly. Trust me on this :)

    (4) About terrorism: well, i can only say that being a member of an open-source community, i know the value of Freedom...
  • One promising concept that I came up with right away was that you could
    manufacture personal air bags, then get a law passed requiring that they be
    installed on congressmen to keep them from taking trips. Let's say your
    congressman was trying to travel to Paris to do a fact-finding study on how
    the French government handles diseases transmitted by sherbet. Just when he
    got to the plane, his mandatory air bag, strapped around his waist, would
    inflate -- FWWAAAAAAPPPP -- thus rendering him too large to fit through the
    plane door. It could also be rigged to inflate whenever the congressman
    proposed a law. ("Mr. Speaker, people ask me, why should October be
    designated as Cuticle Inspection Month? And I answer that FWWAAAAAAPPPP.")
    This would save millions of dollars, so I have no doubt that the public
    would violently support a law requiring airbags on congressmen. The problem
    is that your potential market is very small: there are only around 500
    members of Congress, and some of them, such as House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil,
    are already too large to fit on normal aircraft.
    -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants"

    - this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...

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