Multiple monitors, one CPU?

[jaybesq]

I am setting up a picture frame on my wall. The picture istelf inside
the wood frame, is actually an lcd screen.
I poked a hole through the wall, and have a laptop in the closet behind,
running the XP screensaver pulling pictures off of an external 320 gig
hard drive and displaying them on the screen.

I want to up the ante.
I want to have three to five screens of different sizes displaying different
pictures at the same time, and even occasionally a video short or two.
Is there any software that would allow me to send three pictures
simultaneously in a slideshow to three seperate lcd screens, and is
there a hardware config to set this up in a regular computer with three to five
decent graphics cards, or one that has three to five ports?
Is it cheaper to simply have another coupla cpu's running the screensaver?
Is there a similar type screensaver that will run though a directory of
video shorts? Whaddya think? Thanks for your input.

 

[felixc]

Matrox sells a sort of dongle to split the output of a laptop to two or three screens. With different contents, of course. It comes with a special driver, so you have to check if your laptop is in the list of supported products.

 

[jaybesq]

Thanks, but the only dongle from Maxtor I can see is a splitter - which only seems to replicate the very same picture over more than one screen.
Which dongle are you referring to?

 

[felixc]

I was referring to this product:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/29/matrox_dualhead2go/

 

[jaybesq]

Right. I checked it out, and it is for displaying one screen stretched onto two. I want three-five \different\ screensaver pictures displayed at the same time.

 

[Nelviticus]

To drive that many pixels you'd probably need something with more than one graphics card, which rules out a laptop. You'd probably also need to write your own screensaver or write an app that runs existing ones on separate screens.

There are some Microsoft 'starter kits' (articles for beginner programmers) about developing screen savers:

C#

Visual Basic

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[jaybesq]

Thanks. It looks like there is no easy way.
Guess I'll have to buy a few $500 laptops to make it happen.
Updating them all with new pictures will be a pain.
Thanks for your help.

 

[Nelviticus]

I think there's just so little demand for this kind of thing that you'd be blazing a new trail and getting results would be difficult. Few people need two monitors and even fewer need three or more, and only a tiny proportion of those are interested in running different screensavers on different displays.

You could get around the problem of updating the photos though: network the machines and point them all to a single media store, either the hard drive of one of them or a separate NAS box (like a Buffalo Linkstation).

Alternatively just hang normal pictures on your wall and donate your gadget budget to charity!

Nelviticus

 

[jaybesq]

I had a great laugh to your ending! Thanks!

 

[felixc]

The commercially available digital picture frames won't make it?