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Ali El-Mousa 2003-03-22 04:55
I am about to start work on a special application that will have to include the following:
1- 1 pc using a windows operating system
2- 12 Monitors
The system will have to do the following:
a - use one monitor as a control screen that a user can utilize to control and operate several external functions and the whole application.
b- 10 different monitors located at a distance of 50 meters from the pc in different locations. EACH monitor displays different information.
2- One monitor that will contain 10 different windows. Each of these windows will display exactly the same information as one of the monitors mentioned in b above.
I need to know the following:
A- Is this type of setup actually feasible with a pc using windows?
B- Which windows operating system will be most suitable?
C- Which video cards will be most suitable?
D- will I need to write any special device drivers?
E- will special cables be required?
Any help and advice will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Ali
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Alpay Eno 2003-03-31 06:11
Hello, is your application purely for presentation purposes and NOT meant to be interactive? If so, I have used large TV sets for installs similar to your. I often used Scala Infochannel (www.Scala.com) for "digital signage". Very configurable, very easy to use, and does a great job of antialiasing text and graphics for tv-viewing. For this reason it looks much better than Powerpoint, Director, and others.
You use 1 pc to create/edit your show, and other pc/pc's to display them. transport of your show can be phoneline,lan,internet,satellite, you get the idea. The display is never interupted during updates since you do editing on a "creation station". It sounds like you would use 1 player computer and run video cabling to all the tv's.
Hope this helps. email me if you have other questions, I'm a fan of the software even though I have not used it in a long time.
Alpay Eno
eno@dorsai.org
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Peter Murgatroyd 2003-04-02 22:36
Your going to need a signal booster for each of the twelve monitors that are 50 meters away as a monitor cable signal rapidly deteriorates after a couple of meters. Even with a signal booster, your going to also need expensive monitor cabling as the cheaper cabling will also ruin the picture (to the point that text is unreadable). A-ten is one manufacturer of monitor signal boosting products (have a look at http://www.aten.com.tw/DataCommunication/VideoSplitter/VS_102.html)
As for having 13 desktops... well, your going to need at least three quad-head pci graphics cards to do this, unless the pc has six free pci slots for dual head cards. Have a look at http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/g200_mms/home.cfm and http://www.leadtek.com.tw/www/Web_Leadtek/workstation/Quadro4_NVS.asp
No, you shouldn't need special device drivers, and XP would be your best bet for an operating system.
I'd suggest a dual processor machine with LOTS of ram, as windows is going to eat resources and have a massive internal desktop space with so many monitors. Windows also has a problem managing more than 9 desktops because it doesn't provide the gui tools for the 10+ positioning of the desktops. You'll probably have to get some other software to do this or write your own. It should be quite easy to do in VB if your familiar with making Windows API calls.
Hope this helps
Peter
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