This paper presents a high-quality video streaming technique allowing remotely generated content to be acquired and streamed to multi-tile display environments from a range of sources and over a heterogeneous wide area network. The latter is particularly important when multiple users want to concurrently share content from their personal devices to further augment the shared workspace. Visualization of these distributed data resources may be achieved from a variety of clustered processing and display resources for local rendering and may be streamed on demand and in real-time from remotely rendered content.

They provide a means to present, compare, and correlate data in a broad range of formats and coming from a multitude of different sources. High-resolution display environments built on networked, multi-tile displays have emerged as an enabling tool for collaborative, distributed visualization work. This approach scales well for concurrent playback of multiple videos and does not require any specialized video decoding hardware to achieve ultra-high resolution video playback. Furthermore the system allows for flexible control of the video characteristics, allowing content to be interactively reorganized while maintaining smooth playback.

While network constraints limit the maximum resolution of other high-resolution video playback approaches, this algorithm is able to scale to video at resolutions of tens of millions of pixels and beyond. This approach exploits the computational parallelism of the display cluster while only using minimal network resources in order to maintain software-level synchronization of the video playback. By only reading and rendering the video tiles that correspond to a given node's viewpoint, the computation power required for video playback can be distributed over multiple machines, resulting in a highly scalable video playback system. A preparatory tiling pass separates the original video into a user definable n-by-m array of equally sized video tiles, each of which is individually compressed. This approach is designed for scalable, high-resolution, multi-tile display environments, which are controlled by a cluster of machines, with each node driving one or multiple displays. This paper introduces a distributed approach for playback of video content at resolutions of 4K (digital cinema) and well beyond.

Graphite multispec on tile