Many Composite Video Outputs
I'm not necessarily expecting a miracle solution to this, but I want to see if anyone with more experience with video has anything to critique about a plan of mine.
In short, I need 8 video outputs for my latest patch. The first six are composite outputs for six players in a game to view photos on little LCD screens. The last two are VGA outputs for a projected game timer and a monitor for me. So far the best solution I have is two of these four head VGA cards http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814139049. Add six VGA to composite adapters and voila. I can drag jitter output windows to each LCD and display what I like on them. Yes?
Anything more cost effective/elegant than that? Obvious problems staring me in the face?
Sounds like it should work.
When I do multi-display stuff I like to have 1 large window spanning all the displays (up to 4 projectors and 1 monitor) so I have one openGL context rendering all final outputs together. Then it's a matter of positioning the content in that wide window to match the display resolutions. I'm using jit.gl.videoplanes for that. Should work great with your photo's though it could be done with a jit.matrix approach as well. Depends on whether you could benefit from openGL acceleration on the video card.
You could also check if Matrox has something useful for you, though that would likely be more pricey than the card you found: http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/
Thanks for the feedback! And that's a good thing to try, spanning the displays with one larger rendered image. I'll play around with both techniques to see what the best one for this application would be.
At least one of the Matox cards looks like it supports TV out over VGA, which would mean I could use cheap adapter cables it would seem. Not sure about the Jaton (or Visiontek which also makes such a card), but e-mailed to find out. Otherwise I would need converters I believe, which adds cost and complexity, so the Matrox might be better for me.