The VideoLAN Forums

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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.