Hey,
Been searching on this and haven't been coming up with really anything, so I'm not sure if it just hasn't been done (doubt it) or my google-fu and forum-fu is pretty bad (more likely).
Okay, so here's the deal. I have a lan center/used game store hybrid. I have multiple TVs in the retail portion that people can test games on before they buy (importance of this in a minute). I have a back area that houses 32 machines.
Because we host tournaments, it is hard to fit any number of viewers in the back more than a couple, yet there are quite a few spectators. What I would like to do, is for some way to stream the video data from the machines in the back to the TVs in the front when I host tournaments (Left 4 Dead, DotA, League of Legends, Counter Strike, etc).
Here's what I would like to do; I would like to be able to stream the games to a centralized server, then from the server (either from the web or console) I would like to display any number of screens to the TVs. For example, if I have four people doing Left 4 Dead, I can limit the view to just those four inputs, and if I have people playing DotA, limit it to those five in some sort of grid arrangement. The best example I can think of would be akin to video surveillance cameras and monitoring.
Now, getting the video from the server to the TVs aren't really a problem. I can just use either a PC->TV converter, or similar. This part, is easy.
The hard part is being able to screen capture up to 32 machines onto the centralized server.
I am completely aware of lag and fps drops if I use a software solution on the machine to try and capture and send data simultaneously, so I'm looking more for a hardware solution (however, software-wise, I'm not against it, as long as the performance hit isn't much, although I know this is unlikely).
I know they make switch matrices, but in order to even get something like a 16x4 matrix, those are expensive, not to mention, they limit what is shown by not being able to show multiple inputs on a single output.
The best I have been able to come up with thus far, would be to clone the video output of the computer using the VGA and the Component out (These video cards have a DVI, VGA, and TV-Component out), then use a down-scaler to convert the component to a composite/s-video signal, connected to the central server over BNC connectors utilizing a CCTV input card (Q-SEE cards, for example). The software I have found that would support this would be Zoneminder for linux. Basically treating each computer input data as a security camera.
The output would allow showing multiple 'cameras' in a grid or other pattern to be displayed on a TV.
The downside of this method, is that the quality would be pretty bad, as composite or s-video has a pretty limited resolution capability.
I know for some games that are based off the source engine you can use HLTV and have a dedicated machine running as a spectator, but any game-specific method requires quite a bit of set up unique to that game and would be 'future proof', so to speak.
I do not care about sound, just video. I really much prefer to be able to show multiple inputs on one screen (4 inputs arranged in a grid).
The limits I've been running into, is that a solution like this is usually possible, but usually very expensive (thousands of dollars actually), as well as the fact that I run wide-screen monitors so I can't just use a normal VGA->TV adapter (hence the component->composite to preserve some of the widescreen capabilities).
Any ideas are welcome, and appreciated.
Thanks.
Been searching on this and haven't been coming up with really anything, so I'm not sure if it just hasn't been done (doubt it) or my google-fu and forum-fu is pretty bad (more likely).
Okay, so here's the deal. I have a lan center/used game store hybrid. I have multiple TVs in the retail portion that people can test games on before they buy (importance of this in a minute). I have a back area that houses 32 machines.
Because we host tournaments, it is hard to fit any number of viewers in the back more than a couple, yet there are quite a few spectators. What I would like to do, is for some way to stream the video data from the machines in the back to the TVs in the front when I host tournaments (Left 4 Dead, DotA, League of Legends, Counter Strike, etc).
Here's what I would like to do; I would like to be able to stream the games to a centralized server, then from the server (either from the web or console) I would like to display any number of screens to the TVs. For example, if I have four people doing Left 4 Dead, I can limit the view to just those four inputs, and if I have people playing DotA, limit it to those five in some sort of grid arrangement. The best example I can think of would be akin to video surveillance cameras and monitoring.
Now, getting the video from the server to the TVs aren't really a problem. I can just use either a PC->TV converter, or similar. This part, is easy.
The hard part is being able to screen capture up to 32 machines onto the centralized server.
I am completely aware of lag and fps drops if I use a software solution on the machine to try and capture and send data simultaneously, so I'm looking more for a hardware solution (however, software-wise, I'm not against it, as long as the performance hit isn't much, although I know this is unlikely).
I know they make switch matrices, but in order to even get something like a 16x4 matrix, those are expensive, not to mention, they limit what is shown by not being able to show multiple inputs on a single output.
The best I have been able to come up with thus far, would be to clone the video output of the computer using the VGA and the Component out (These video cards have a DVI, VGA, and TV-Component out), then use a down-scaler to convert the component to a composite/s-video signal, connected to the central server over BNC connectors utilizing a CCTV input card (Q-SEE cards, for example). The software I have found that would support this would be Zoneminder for linux. Basically treating each computer input data as a security camera.
The output would allow showing multiple 'cameras' in a grid or other pattern to be displayed on a TV.
The downside of this method, is that the quality would be pretty bad, as composite or s-video has a pretty limited resolution capability.
I know for some games that are based off the source engine you can use HLTV and have a dedicated machine running as a spectator, but any game-specific method requires quite a bit of set up unique to that game and would be 'future proof', so to speak.
I do not care about sound, just video. I really much prefer to be able to show multiple inputs on one screen (4 inputs arranged in a grid).
The limits I've been running into, is that a solution like this is usually possible, but usually very expensive (thousands of dollars actually), as well as the fact that I run wide-screen monitors so I can't just use a normal VGA->TV adapter (hence the component->composite to preserve some of the widescreen capabilities).
Any ideas are welcome, and appreciated.
Thanks.