(affordable) way to displaying 4 video signals on one monitor?

[Ishar]

For some reason I can't find the comprehensive guide to hardware tools and the link on vyndree's guide to guides isnt working wither. Maybe its user error. I read it awhile back and don't remember this mentioned on it, so gonna ask this...

I'm looking at my 6 monitors, thinking, wow, this is all barely within my field of view. Dern non-hardware multiboxers and their maximizer screen splitting two monitor setups! then I thought, hey, maybe theres a way to take 4 video signals and display it on one monitor....

So, some cursory googling turned up two main classes things...

first, theres these monstrosities, that seem to be designed for that, with a lot of bells and whistles. example here ('http://www.networktechinc.com/quad-splitter.html'). 4k apeice. Called Quad Screen Splitters? and various other versions of that. Way too expensive though. If you have unlimited funds tho, might be a fun way to 4box.

So, I'm obviously not going to drop 4k on that. so, lets move on.

I also found this ('http://www.spytown.com/evblacandwhi.html') Which seems to be designed for security cameras. But I'm wondering if you couldnt convert the video cables to VGA or DVI or whatever, and get it to work for this? The key word here seems to be color quad. Anyway, in the 100 to 200 dollar price range, so much more affordable. But might not work...

Anyone ever messed with security cameras and this sort of thing, and know if this is possible? There's probably alot of hidden pitfals, like limited resolutions for input output on the cheap box. meh. Still, would be cool to do, if it were possible for less than 4k...

Sorry if this has been discussed or covered. I searched but couldnt find anything. Naming is so...hard.

as an aside....we really need a List of (hardware? software? both..) Terminology somewhere that you can skim. You know, something like this:

Keyboard multiplier - a hardware device that broadcasts keystrokes to multiple machines. AKA keyboard multiplexer(misnomer), vetra(particular brand, misnomer), insert-other-aliases here.

except for most things. Just to aid people searching for answers. (points at above) no idea what to call it. didn't find any posts for color quad or quad screen splitter tho

[-silencer-]

I've seen someone send 4 S-video out cables from 4 different machines to a 5th machine with 4 video capture cards, then showing 4 windows on the display on the 5th machine. He used it for video/sound mixing and editing, but I don't see why it wouldn't work for WoW.

[Wilbur]

http://www.michaeldvd.com.au/Articles/PALvsNTSC/PALvsNTSC.asp

The $120 thing you listed won't cut it.

Those things are $4k for a reason. Not many people want them and they are fairly expensive to make because of that.

[Stabface]

It's entirely possible to do it through software. What resolution are you running your individual machines at?

[Stabface]

I would set up a video capture and streaming client on each slave box, and then a video mosaic with VLC on the master machine.

http://wiki.videolan.org/Mosaic

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I would set up a video capture and streaming client on each slave box, and then a video mosaic with VLC on the master machine.

http://wiki.videolan.org/MosaicWill that work with 3D sufaces? Last I checked, it would only work with 2D stuff, and possibly not even that depending on hardware overlay support.

[Stabface]

I'm not sure what you mean by 3D surfaces? It's just dealing with standard mpeg video stream, basically anything that VLC will play you can tile (I think FLV is a bit twitchy but may work with later builds).

I have helped a friend set up a video conference multiplexer. Basically the problem there was he has some employees working remotely and wanted to video conference all of them together. His existing way was to just have people launch multiple instances of netmeeting or whatever, but due to bandwidth constraints it's impossible at a certain number of clients to do peer-to-peer since each person has to send up and down N-1 video streams and have that many clients running. Terrible idea! You can solve this with a server software solution but it costs $$$ and we wanted it to cost 0$ instead :)
So instead we created a VLC mosaic server that tiles a 3x3 matrix of webcam video feeds back out into a video stream. So each person only needs to feed up their webcam stream (easy) and then the server feeds down the resulting video stream of the mosaic (also easy) from a nice fast centralized server (no bandwidth or local CPU constraints). In this case it was a 4x4 matrix of 320x240 output from the webcams, the mosaic downstream feed was done at 1440 x 1024 as I recall (we put some border and name below each individual feed).

So to do this with WoW you just need a capture and streaming video program to snag the WoW window video (+ audio if you like) off each slave (lots out there, VLC alone can do it) and send it over the local network to your master box where it's all multiplexed and displayed.

[daviddoran]

Well, after looking at Ellay's video feed, it seems like something like that should work well, and in a LAN environment, there should be enough bandwidth to get better resolution. Or maybe remote desktop? Not sure if the performance would be there...

[Ishar]

Bummer about the box. sort of figured it for a long shot tho.

Thanks for the videolan idea. I'll have to mess around with that sometime when theres less Boring RL Stuff going on.