1080 whatever. Memo (Mehmet) Akten, musician, visualist, creative developer, and self-described “mad scientist” wanted to play a 4800 x 600 pixel QuickTime video file across two outputs. Well, not just two outputs, even – two outputs feeding three triple-head outputs feeding six projectors.
There’s just one problem: most video apps choke on a file that big. They use textures on the graphics card to display video, but the maximum size of a texture is usually 4096 pixels. QuickTime Pro can handle the job, but not across multiple outputs.
Solution? Build a new app: “Mega Super Awesome & mega super basic” QT Player:
MSA QT Player – Fullscreen Quicktime player across multiple video-outs
It’s a Mac-only beast, built with QTKit – Apple’s preferred modern way of developing atop QuickTime – and Cocoa + Mac OS X 10.5. (If you’re hacking like this, best to start with one OS at a time.)
All I can say is, Memo, here’s what I suggest for lunch. The rough equivalent of a 4800 pixel-wide video.
Yep, that’s one Snacker sandwich, one piece of chicken, 2 crispy strips, 2 sides, 1 biscuit, (1) 32-oz (that’s, um, a bucket in metric) soda. It comes with $5 off Guitar Hero, though $5 off Wii Fit may be what you need. Watch the video.
Why do I make the comparison? Because overkill is awesome.
Now, of course, some of us want all this multiple-projector action but wouldn’t even think of playing our pixels back from a video. We want to generate it all using fancy code we’ve copied from smarter people developed out of our massive brains. For that job, you want Most Pixels Ever, the Processing/Java library.
But Memo, this is an impressive achievement and, chicken jokes aside, probably very useful. Question: would the same solution be possible with ffmpeg, etc., on other platforms (or even the Mac)?