Splitting one video, onto mulitple screens

The_B_Man

If I have a laptop with a video on it, and I have say 4 plasma TVs, whats the easiest way to dispay a video on all 4 screens and stretch the image so it just looks like 1 big TV?
Look here for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo8SstWVsxE#at=205

Notice how the sea in the background is stretched over all the TVs. This was done in the 80s so I'm gonna take it that technology has improved since then!


If the laptop only has VGA output, I'm assuming I'll probably need some form of splitter. Would these be expensive? What about if I have an iPhone, can DLNA do this?

Thanks for the advice.

sink

You won't be able to do this with laptop. You need a desktop with a graphics card with either nvidia surround or amd eyefinity for it to work well.

seamus

I very much doubt that this can be done over DNLA as it would require either the iPhone to recognise the four screens are linked and transmit a certain portion of the video to each device, or the devices would need to recognise eachother and support being linked in this way.

Your primary obstacle here is that you're using a laptop. What you can get is a splitter cable with diverts a VGA signal to multiple monitors, however it shows the same thing on all monitors.
In order to divide the desktop up across multiple screens, you need a graphics adapter which supports this. For laptops, the ATI XGP will do this. But I don't think it's cheap. You're looking at the guts of €2k.

Alternatively you could put together a cheap minimalist PC with two dual graphics cards for less than €400 and this can stretch the video across the 4 screens as you require.

The_B_Man

Hmm, thats a pity.
I know it can be done on two monitors easily with a desktop, as I've used dual-monitors in work a few times.

I was hoping to get maybe a VGA splitter and send the full output to that one splitter and then somehow split it into 4, but I'd probably need some specialist equipment to do that anyway.

I'll have to see what the story is now with a cupla gfx cards in a custom PC...

Skerries

yeah you'd really have to go down the eyefinity route which requires a custom desktop
what are you doing with them?

The_B_Man

Just displaying a video on 4 screens to make it even bigger. A projector might be an option I suppose, if I can borrow one.

Just looking at EyeFinity there. It says you "require one panel with a DisplayPort connector. "?? Whats that?
Also, you need a TV Tuner (sold seperately)?? Seems like a lot of hassle for 3+ screens when compared to 2 screens.

Skerries

displayport is just the newest type of video connection for pc's, it looks like a usb port
you can get the adapter for about €15