Design and Implementation of a Real-Time Video Player on Tiled-Display System

This paper presents a design and implementation of realtime video player that operates on a tiled-display system consisting of multiple PCs to provide a very large and high resolution display. In the proposed system, the master process transmits a compressed video stream to multiple PCs using UDP multicast. All slaves (PC) receive the same video stream, decompress, clip their designated areas from the decompressed video frame, and display it to their displays while being synchronized with each other. A simple synchronization mechanism based on the H/W clock of each slave is proposed to avoid the skew between the tiles of the display, and a flow-control mechanism based on the bit-rate of the video stream and a pre-buffering scheme are proposed to prevent the jitter. The proposed system is implemented with Microsoft DirectX filter technology in order to decouple the video/audio codec from the player. Experimental results on a tiled display system with 28 PCs show that the proposed system could display a video stream in a realtime without jitter and skew.