Triple or Quadrupal monitor control

[Apostle]

I know absolutely nothing about programing so I'm not sure how attainable this request will be. First off let me say thanks for ZionWorx, it has been a real blessing to my church as we finally ventured into the age of technology. I was wondering about the ability to control more than just two monitors in ZionWorx. Right now we have a control monitor and a display projector, but we are considering getting TV's to place in the church foyer and on the stage for the choir. I'd like to be able to run announcements on the foyer TV continually and song lyrics with musical instructions (such as solo, sopranos only etc) on the choir TV's. The TV's would recieve signal from S-Video outputs. I have never tried hooking a computer to my TV through S-Video so any suggestions on how to accomplish this or another way to run this besides using ZionWorx would be greatly appreciated.

[Diceman]

There have been various discussions regarding multiple output ideas previously in this forum - I recommend a search.

Your posting does highlight the increasing want for this application in forthcoming releases of zionworx (although since version 3 is long overdue I would guess the specification is now locked to ensure timely delivery).

Regarding the words in the foyer - I would recommend a separate PC, - since it is not required to be in sync with anything else in the service and would run quite happily on its own. If you have three adaptors to your PC and really want to use one PC for all then consider using an independent player on that screen - for example: drag a flash player to that monitor and run a presentation there on a loop.

The concept of having different information being passed in sync to the worship leading team and to the crowd has also been discussed before but I'm unaware of any attempts to include this type of multi-threaded output support into zionworx soon (Christian may put me right on this ).

As I read it you are proposing having a PC with 4 output monitors - this is in theory possible with little expense by in addition to the AGP or integrated graphics card having dual output, installing two cheap PCI graphics adaptors for the additional outputs (this is because each screen will require it's own area of video memory called a RAMDAC - most graphics cards have resources for two screens - although some MATROX cards support multiples). Also be aware that multiple graphics cards can run into memory allocation problems which can only be fixed through tweaking allocation settings in startup scripts or in system settings.

For S-video output you will need to enable this output in your driver (see your graphics driver documentation and download the newest drivers). It is also worth noting that just because a graphics card has several outputs it does not mean that it can handle the same number of indigenous screens, often cloning or switching is employed with the plethora of options simply there as a matter of connectivity provision.

In all these things - experimentation is the answer - perhaps the forthcoming version of Zionworx which allows control over window positioning manually will allow multiple running copies of Zionworx to facilitate your ideas (I don't know if Zionworx is capable of running multiple instances without error).

Hope this helps,

Kind regards

Diceman