Multiple screens, multiple videos. How to play at same time?

[gherkingvlc]

Bear with me here :

I'm authoring a four-screen video-art gallery installation.

I'm achieving this by creating the videos as four joined screens i.e.. a 2880x576 image (I'm working in Widescreen Standard Def PAL).

To display this, I'm splitting the master copy into two: One copy with the first screen, and one copy with screens two, three and four.
This is then displayed on a single monitor and an extra wide monitor for the three extra screens.
The extra wide monitor is in fact appearing to the computer as a single monitor, but is in reality split to three signals by a Matrox triplehead2go device.

This is my setup:

Computer
| |
| |
| M a t r o x b o x
| | | |
| | | |
Monitor 1 Monitor 2 Monitor 3 Monitor 4

This is my problem: I can get two instances of VLC without problems, but how can I make them play simultaneously?
Problem 2: My tests playing back a large 2880x576 video give borders on VLC, even though it plays back fine in something like Quicktime. I gave VLC a custom aspect ratio of 64:9, but it still squashes the video to that ratio with borders. Hmmm. Why the borders?

Give me a shout if you can help!

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Normally, you'd have only one video with a native A.R. of 64/9 and play that.

[gherkingvlc]

Thanks Rémi.
Am I right in understanding that vlc can span monitors in fullscreen mode?
unfortunately I don't have the gear here currently to test it.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

That's not VLC's problem. It depends how the window manager sees the monitors, which depends on how the hardware driver presents them to the system.

[HelyxChase]

How were you going about assigning these to the screens? I am working on a similar project and could use help.

[gherkingvlc]

Hi Helyxchase,

In the end, we solved this in quite a low tech way. Instead of playing one or two videos across multiple PC screens, I mastered the different regions to standard DVD video. Four discs were put in four DVD players of the same model and brand, and triggered by a single IR remote.

Result: No-frills, perfectly synced multi-screen video. Hope this helps mate.