A Lot of Monitors a Few Computers

June 21, 2012 7:07 AM

I would like to run a lot of monitors (100+) with a few computers. Functionality isn't important, the visual is. It's for an art space. Any suggestions?
posted by Optamystic to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Do you want to run them interactively? Do you want to repeat the same image across each monitor, or tile one image across many?

The last time I looked at this, there were cards out there that would let you run 8 screens from a single PC, and in theory, you could run 2 of these in the same PC.
posted by Oktober at 7:14 AM on June 21, 2012

Response by poster: Probably a combination of all three. The vast majority of them would be "pretty but dumb" cool screen savers tiled across multiple monitors, a number of them would have actual data (twitter feeds, whatever) then a handful would be tied to functional workstations.
posted by Optamystic at 7:20 AM on June 21, 2012

Perhaps you're looking for a video wall controller?
posted by schmod at 7:34 AM on June 21, 2012

Google "digital signage software." It's an entire industry whose job is to do precisely this (usually with the screens in different physical locations, but it's the same basic functionality).
posted by jbickers at 7:39 AM on June 21, 2012

If they don't all need to show different things, you can split VGA. For example, Monoprice has 1x16 splitters for $75 and 2x16 for $120. There's 32 monitors covered from a single dual monitor card.
posted by ftm at 8:07 AM on June 21, 2012

Best answer: A friend of mine did a similar thing in Brum last year, it's all documented pretty well on his site including the cheap Ebay VGA splitters he used
posted by brilliantmistake at 2:23 AM on June 22, 2012

The more computers you have, the easier this will be. As you're only running basic things, I would start looking for whatever old computers you can scrounge.
posted by katrielalex at 10:23 AM on June 22, 2012