Windows – Play video across multiple monitors

Trying out Fedora 11 (XServer 1.7) and Ubuntu 9.10 (XServer 1.6.4) I can safely say the issue is still broken - If not more broken than before :-p

Some things I learned that might be useful to others:

• Linux is starting to boot very very fast! :-D
• When X dies for whatever reason it gets stuck in a restart-loop, this happens for the nvidia, nv and nouveau drivers
• X can start without any xorg.conf using some auto-detect settings
  • unfortunately this only worked on my onboard GeForce 9300 for the nivida driver, nv and nouveau don't work with the onboard graphics.
  • Monitor resolution wasn't detected properly
  • Enabling ssh server allowed me to just ssh into the box once it'd broken as the restart-loop - being able to change the config and force a reboot is better than booting into the live cd to do the same thing :-p
• The 32-bit PAE kernel breaks the nvidia drivers - (didn't try with nv or Nouveau) - everything (even 2d) became very slow and you could literally see portions of the screen been redrawn
• 64bit support worked out of the box but non of the 32bit only packages would work without forcing them and even then some would still break; :-p
• NV is acceptable for very basic use to avoid having to use propriatary binaries
• Nouveau is a lot faster than I'd thought and runs a 2D setup pretty well; It even handles dual head output really nicely using the built in configuration AND also rotation so I was really impressed;
  • Nouveau doesn't yet support multicard setups - reading the site it looks as if none of the developers have this sort of setup and hence no way to test; Almost makes me want to gather a donation together and donate a basic system of this sort to sombody to just get it done - or learn the ins and out and start contributing myself

It seems like I go through this process every 3-4 months:

• Hear about latest features under linux
• Avoid them for a while
• Try them out
• Realise it's all still broken
• Wait another 3-4 months

For now I'm back to my trusty windows xp setup; it never fails to boot (boot time feels incredibly slow now that I've seen ubuntu boot that fast), all my applictions work out of the box and my hardware has decent driver support!! :-p

Update: I logged a ticket with Nvidia and they gave me the standard 2 options:

• Use Twinview and a single X desktop without Xinerama
• Use 3x single X servers and join using Xinerama

The point they mentioned regarding the second option is that all graphical requests via Xinerama are looped for each screen (so each screen sees the same request, most likely altered based on the relative position of the screen to the original); So every operation occurs 3 times - which explains the performance hit; I guess if you have 3 things going in within each window that's 9 operations; This probably affects the two screens on the same GPU more than the one that has an entire GPU for a single screen but it was so noticeable just using a standard desktop that even rendering a web page in Firefox was delayed somewhat.

It depends on your graphics card.

Windows has supported more than two monitors since Windows 98. You just needed the hardware support to enable this.

If you have an AMD card, you need an Eyefinity-enabled card, that has DVI and DisplayPort/mini-DisplayPort outputs. Cards of the Radeon HD 5000 generation and later will work. You'll have to have at least one of the monitors plugged into the mini-DisplayPort/DisplayPort output to a DisplayPort-enabled monitor. Or, if you only have DVI inputs, you'll need an active (mini) DisplayPort to DVI adapter.

If you have nVidia, you need two cards in SLI to drive three monitors using their 3D Vision technology.

You can also do this with multiple graphics cards installed. This is how you did it back in the Windows 98 days. However, in this configuration, you won't be able to game or use hardware video processing on using all of them. But for basic work, it works fine.