Movie on a Tiled Display

Idea: on the side of our main project (building a tiled displays for 3D graphics), I wanted "my" personal movie theater.

Using, VLC tools, I managed to get movie streaming onto a tiled display we are currently setting up. Basically, it uses VLMS to stream a file over multicast, and then each node of the cluster runs VLC to display the movie full screen, without audio. The "wall" filter of VLC allows to display a subpart of the image on each node. Another instance of VLC is run on the server for control, and for the audio output (now still PC spakers, but we should get a surround setup). On the pictures below, you can see the components:

• 4x2 tiles : 8 DLP projectors, with a cluster of PCs (9 nodes) consisting of dual athlons and GeForce3 cards, running Linux,
• ~5.5meter by 2meter translucent screen, using backprojection,
• a laptop, with wireless network, allowing to control the application (here, start/stop streaming with vlms)

Notes:

• No effort has been made yet to align and correct the colors of the projectors,
• Slight modification to VLC is around the aspect ratio factor to take into account the tilling,
• It seems there's still a problem with 16/9 movies (see last picture),
• I'd like to run the "deinterlace" plugin with the "wall" filter, but that doesn't work yet (you have to choose one of these),
• Thanks a lot guys from VideoLan.org

More information about our tiled display system, see http://www.icwall.org

Pictures of the Setup

From the front of the screen (guess the movie ;-)   tiled01.jpg tiled02.jpg tiled03.jpg tiled04.jpg   From the back...     tiled05.jpg tiled06.jpg     In the dark...     tiled07.jpg tiled08.jpg       Still a bug for 16/9 ...     tiled09.jpg

Luc renambot,
renambot@cs.vu.nl
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~renambot