[MPlayer-users] Synchronized video between multiple computers (mplayer or others?)

[Morris Beverly]

Christian Knoepfle wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> is there a way to synchronize video playback between multiple computers,
> e.g. you have two computers with two screens and two videos of the same
> length, one showing the left part of the movie and the other one the right
> part of the movie? So when I play back both of them, arrange the screens
> side by side I get the full video. 
>   
We do this for corporate events pretty regularly.  There's a few things 
to think about.  You can't really but projected images together and get 
a decent image - there's always a seem.  You need to create a blended 
edge and an overlap when you do the videos.  The best thing to do with 
these 2  videos is to combine them into one big video and run them on 
the same computer with a multiple output video cards set up as one 
display.  This works great on linux, not so much on windows.  You can 
see some examples of doing it this way on our website:  
http://www.avpresentations.com/gallery.html

I'm currently doing a dual output card for a widescreen blended center 
screen and two other pcs with single cards for outside screens, all 
locked together with mplayer & some crappy java code I wrote.   You can 
email me directly if you want more gory details.

Now for your other question,

> Actually I am looking for a solution which is not only limited to 2
> computers but could handle 24 for playing back a video of 6000x3000 pixels
> (each computer delivers 1024x768pixels, 6 in a row, 4 columns, see
> www.heyewall.com for more details). So I would split the big video in 24
> smaller videos and then I would like to play them back frame synced. 
>
>   

This is probably best done with DMX and/or chromium.  I think this 
should work well for you if you have display cubes, but not so great for 
projection.  Chromium currently seems to have a problem with it's edge 
blending code, so you couldn't smoothly blend the projector edges.

There are also some commercial programs for doing this based around the 
mac and geared mostly towards lighting guys (using DL-1 moving 
projectors) such as the Catalyst system.

hth,

morris