A few months ago I wrote some software to show synchronised video on multiple screens for Leilani Kake's Ngā Hau e Whā at Fresh Gallery. It is called Opo.
Since then, almost every video artist I meet says that they once tried to do synchronised video which the gallery thought they could sync by pressing play on all the DVD players at the same time, but in every case the video drifted apart and was ruined and embarrassing. Meanwhile all the gallery technicians talk about expensive solutions, using DVD players that link up or other specialised hardware or gazillion dollar Mac software. Opo is free. All you need is a computer with multiple video outputs (like 4 or 6 or maybe even 8), or for heaps of screens, corresponding heaps of computers with multiple video outputs. Apart from the extra video cards, they are ordinary computers: after the show it can go in the office for normal stuff like accounts or solitaire or whatever. The Ngā Hau e Whā computer had 4 video outputs and cost $600. An advantage of this method over DVD players is that you aren't restricted to an archaic video format designed for 1990s analogue TVs. You can tune your video to suit the projectors (which probably means 1024x768 non-interlaced, unless you hire the 1280x720 ADA/Physics Room projectors). It can be a bit fiddly to set up though. So if you want to use Opo and aren't too sure about compiling C or testing Gstreamer pipelines, you might be best to get the gallery to hire me to do it. There are websites here http://halo.gen.nz/opo/ and here http://repo.or.cz/w/opo.git. The name references the Video Whale project, which used Gstreamer to synchronise video for a video wall in 2002. http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/apps/videowhale.html Video technology has changed quite a bit since then, not all for the better, so Opo has to do a few things differently. Douglas _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
