Video Wall Question

[yojoe]

I'm looking to set up something similar to a video wall (like the display in the back of Best Buy stores) but in a smaller scale. Looking for a solution to put all the old tube TVs to use where I can do one video input on all of the screens or separate video input for each TV.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Matthias99]

This is almost always done via a hardware solution -- a device that takes a video signal and splits it up into a bunch of signals to be outputted to a number of displays. They're not cheap, at least if you want anything other than regular old 480i video (and even then they're not real cheap).

I don't know of any off the top of my head that would also let you mix signals to the displays independently.

If you were using computer monitors (or HDTVs with VGA/DVI inputs), you could use a computer with multiple graphics cards to drive the displays (I think WinXP supports up to 20 monitors, so you could do a 4x4 'wall'). I don't know how well scaling a video feed up to huge resolutions like that would work, though.

 

[yojoe]

Thanks, Matthias99.

Now, I at least have a direction to do further research. This is something I really want to do for a while but I really have no background in. Do you know where I can go for more information in the hardware solution to this?

I don't think high definition is a high priority for me. It'll be nice to have a working model of any kind first.

 

[Matthias99]

If you're looking at a PC-based solution, you will probably want Matrox triple- or quad-head PCI video cards. They're not real cheap (considering the performance), but they will let you put a LOT of monitors on a single computer.

I don't really know much about standalone solutions; I'd try searching for 'video wall' on google as a start...