Hey Sam and KillerBug(and any one else with useful advice), I hope this fits well here as it is a bit out of the ordinary when it comes to building a PC. My girlfriends dad, knowing I am a computer geek, and electronics geek in general has asked me to research a project for the shop he works in. They have 10 video booths. Each booth has 1 TV. Now in a cabinet, they have 8 DVD Players(Philips DVP642). They are hooked in to something they call a server. I believe the system is a EL 01859 Switcher Cabinet. You can see the "sever" here:
http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/7660/img951379.jpg I dunno if this is truly some ancient server or wth it is. Anyways the system is set up so that after putting token in the booth, you are able to change the channel on the TV. There are 8 channels, so channel 1 is going to display whatever DVD is on DVD Player 1 wherever it is in the video weather it be 10 min in or 1 hour in. Switch to channel 2, you see whats on DVD Player 2. And so on.
Well the current system works but he wants to convince the boss to switch to a disc-less system. He got an estimate from a company called http://www.videotel-inc.com/ who said it would cost about $30,000 for the set up. I am thinking this can be done for a lot cheaper! He wants to be able to display 99 movies at one time though, because the TVs can accommodate 99 channels. However thinking about this more in depth, you would need quite a bit of power to process 99 movies at the same time. I think 5 video cards, if used in a dual monitor type configuration would be sufficient to power 10 TVs, but how could the channel changing operation be implemented? What about enough CPU power for 99 movies at once? Would the 5 video cards even be sufficient? If the video card is only be used to render the video for the TV, I would think the rest of the video processing could be done on the CPU but that technically leaves 89 movies left for the CPU to be processing at one.
Obviously on a smaller scale it could be done very easy, but the main thing the puzzles me is how the channel changing operation would be handled as I am unsure if this owuld be hardware,software of a combo of both.
i dont think you can get all 99 channels, cause crt tv's usally dont have a vga and you need a graphic card with s-video just to hook up a computer even with flat screens you can only get 1-3 channels, but how ever you could leave it on 1 computer (per tv) and just use media player (or something) and let them choose, but that would require 10 pc's, you can get though pc of ebay for $40 with xp (so it only be $400) and do it that way.
