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So, it has been a while since the last update. Here at the dorm we have been busy doing the mandatory spring cleaning and playing freesbie. We have also started the barbaque season, very nice! At the university it is time to select the courses for the autumn semester. Unfortunatly I have almost used my ECTS points by now so I need to be quite picky, I’m currently thinking of taking Advanced Algorithmics and Lossless/Lossy data compression.

At CAVI I am currently investigating how to best go about constructing a videoplayer running on our cluster. It should also scale to another cluster we are still only designed which will consist of about 7 nodes. The video should be tiled and player in synch on all nodes with one (extra) node handling the audio. I have looked a bit into the source of MPlayer, Xine and videolan (vlc). Videolan allows for the streaming of the video to all nodes and has plugins for dividing the movie into tiles for a walled display. Unfortunately I have not been able to get an multicast IP address from the system administrators yet, so I have only tested it the multiple unicast streams where the nodes weren’t entirely free of synchronization glitches. None of the players seem to have built-in support for stereo rendering in OpenGL, so I will need to update their code anyways. With MPlayer or Xine I will even need to write new plugins, and fiddle with their code to enable them to use a common clock.