Linux "Video Whale Project" home made video wall

Submitted by charlie.collins on Sun, 01/19/2003 - 20:40

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Hardware

I recently stumbled across a pretty good media player "framework" that is a potential alternative to XINE (XINE is a great project too, but its not an easy interface for those new to it to use and its sometimes problematic to get new formats or codecs to work). The new framework is Gstreamer. Gstreamer dynamically gets codecs, supports a bunch of formats, etc. Gstreamer looks really really cool but the sample apps rely on Gnome, so I have not yet tried it. Anyway, I am checking out their site and notice that a user of Gstreamer made a video wall using traditional monitors and you guessed it, Gstreamer. He is calling his achievement the "Video Whale" project. Its not as way cool as your normal 58 thousand dollar video wall, but its pretty damn good for 16 monitors and a cpu. In fact its amazing. Do this with 16 flat screen monitors with almost no border and you will have something (but you will have spent as much as just buying a big damn plasma screen, oh well). Check out the Video Whale Project.

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Re:a pretty good Linux media player

Submitted by Bwaha (not verified) on Mon, 01/20/2003 - 09:55.

I like mplayer myself. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/ When I looked at the linked page and the pictures there all I could think of was, wow it must be hot next to that thing!

Re:a pretty good Linux media player

Submitted by atrox (not verified) on Mon, 01/20/2003 - 12:01.

lol, i didnt think of that but good point. in winter this is great, in summer?

Re:a pretty good Linux media player

Submitted by atrox (not verified) on Mon, 01/20/2003 - 12:05.

ALSO, mplayer looks way cool. thanks for the info. one of my main gripes with other players (actually with apple) is that i cant play quicktime movies in linux, not easily anyway. from reading some of the mplayer stuff it looks like it either already does that or soon will. i wish apple would release a damn quicktime player for linux! i mean they have OSX players so how hard would it be to provide a linux port? i am sure i dont understand something with the political or technical aspects of this, but it pisses me off.

Re:a pretty good Linux media player

Submitted by Andy (not verified) on Mon, 01/20/2003 - 17:49.

Ohh, it already does baby! My mplayer setup plays DVDs (don't tell the MPAA), MPEG/AVI, divx, windows media codecs, real codecs, quicktime codecs, mp3, ogg, yada, yada. Yea, and that video wall is quite nice. But does the amount of border space around the moniters bother anyone else but me? It really screws with the picture. He should make his own custom housing for the moniters that has no plastic border...that'd be cool.

Re:a pretty good Linux media player

Submitted by Bwaha (not verified) on Mon, 01/20/2003 - 18:16.

"My mplayer setup plays DVDs (don't tell the MPAA)," Oh I think it'd be mencoder that they'd be upset about. :) I am a novice transcoder/ripper myself. Man it's fun! I just ran mplayer in the root window of my X Window session today, it was awesome! mplayer -fs -rootwin file.avi And the avi I played I made myself. A bit old but it got me started: http://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de/index.html I believe that we are just now at the cusp of the era of digital convergence. MP3s started it, now transcoded video carries it further. Hang out with dedicated users and the developers in #mplayer on irc.freenode.net oh yeah and me too. Sometimes we're a little quiet in there, so be patient. We're probably watching movies.