Magic Music Visuals

anyone made any experience with this? i found these "graphic extension modules" from matrox which apparently merge multiple monitors to "one big screen" that you can plug into your gpu output. http://www.multi-monitors.com/product_p/dh2go-2.htm . this may be a great way to use multiple projectors with just one wide magic output. do you think this would work with magic and are there others of these things than matrox (they do seem rather old with no hdmi and vga and stuff), i just keeps stumbling over them. any idea what theyre actually called?

Nvidia has a mode called "Surround" which lets you span 3 displays: http://www.nvidia.com/object/3d-vision- ... ology.html. The reason they do 3 (instead of 2) is so you don't have the monitor borders down the middle of the image.

I thought I remembered being able to span only 2 displays with the Nvidia drivers, but I can't find information about it anywhere.

Other than that I'm not sure about the Matrox. Seems like it will work but I've never used it.

It's possible I may be able to get Magic's fullscreen window to span multiple displays... it's on my to-do list. Not sure if it will work but I will try.

you're a genious eric. it works perfectly . i didn't know about this feature, apparently it's been around for a while now.

made a quick test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ncjd0DJ ... e=youtu.be .

i'll make a quick guide for other users.

\\Edit:

guide for nvidia surround. make n monitors as 1.

1. go look if your nvidia gpu is on the list: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technol ... orted-gpus . mine (660, not ti) wasnt on the list, still works.

2. go to your nvidia control panel 3. click on 'configure surround, physics', then tick 'span displays with surround', then 'configure'.
4. follow the instructions, close some programs

5. select the topology (if the displays are next to each other horizontally or vertically), choose the displays you want to "surround", rearrange the displays to the correct order, choose resolution and refresh rate, enter a value at "bezels". it seems to account for the distance your monitors are apart from each other. hit 'enable surround' and you're done.

Just for sake of answering the question...

this may be a great way to use multiple projectors with just one wide magic output. do you think this would work with magic and are there others of these things than matrox (they do seem rather old with no hdmi and vga and stuff), i just keeps stumbling over them. any idea what theyre actually called?

Yes, the Matrox range work fine and have been around for years. I use the original TH2Go Digital edition (DVI based) with a 2014 retina MBPro via Displayport to active dual-link DVI adapter to be able to output 3x 1920x1080 projectors from Magic, and 2x 1920x1080 projectors on the Macbook's remaining Thunderbolt & HDMI outputs from Isadora (5 projectors from single Macbook).

The current versions are the DisplayPort editions (HDMI & VGA are old).[

Thanks for the clarufication. Generally speaking, do you know if displayport will supercede hdmi?

Displayport 1.2 and HDMI 1.3 serve different needs. HDMI has bi-directional audio and can carry ethernet data. Usually best suited for home theater.
Displayport currently has more bandwidth, but the main advantage is the ability to daisy chain monitors/projectors, IF said monitors/projectors have both input and output ports (the last device on the chain can be a standard monitor/projector since it would not need an output)

HDMI 2.0 is the latest standard, which will carry more bandwidth than Displayport 1.2 but displayport 1.3 will have the ability to stream two 4K signals and will almost double the bandwidth of HDMI 2.0

The drawback of Displayport is if you want to take full advantage of it(multiple independent monitors from a single output)you would need to upgrade to compatible(input+output) monitors/projectors, which can prove costly.

This is one of the main reasons I use a tower as opposed to a laptop. I can easily upgrade my graphics card, ram, hd etc. to keep up with constantly changing standards. e.g. A six output pci-e graphics card for less than the cost of a single displayport compatible monitor.

My decisions are financially motivated. Beer is getting expensive.

Hi Eric, is there likely to be an option to create multiple magic windows, within magic? So for example, I could drag one onto external screen 1 and another to external screen 2? For whatever reason, I'm unable to clone my 2 external displays within windows... not sure why, am running a monitor from DVI and projector from HDMI. and have windows 8 with nVidia GTX 860m

I am hoping to add that option eventually, but I don't think it will be in the immediate future.

However, there is a "secret" undocumented feature which lets you run more than one instance of Magic at the same time. It's experimental, but the users who've tried it seem to think it works well. The only problem I've encountered is that you can't use an ASIO audio device more than once.

If you go to the Start menu, open a command prompt, and navigate to the Magic directory (cd Program Files\Magic, or whatever your installation directory is), you can type Magic -mi. It enables the "multiple instance" feature. You can do it as many times as you like, and go fullscreen on whichever monitors you like. The cool thing about it is you can either load the same project, or completely different projects.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Hi so I just did the test as you wrote to do and it worked

Good to know it's possible. Actually though what I had in mind was to have a computer monitor that has a clone of the projector image, so I could just look at the monitor if the projection is behind me, instead of having to keep turning around.

It's not really an issue and I can sort it by just setting up with a good view of the projection.

Ah sorry I guess I misunderstood .

You can still see the small Magic window though, even if the projection is behind you, right? You could resize it to make it bigger if that helps.

Strange that you can't mirror the displays. Maybe it won't let you simultaneously mirror one and not another?

Hi Eric, so from your last reply I realised that I had some problem and I've only just had chance to test it out...

I didn't realise that the magic window remains even when you ctrl + F fullscreen... Normally at home I run the output to an external monitor connected to my laptop by VGA (the monitor is a Philips 190C at 1280x1024 resolution). When I hit ctrl + F then it goes fullscreen on my laptop, and after ctrl + F again it only goes to the right-hand half of the screen on the moitor. I realise now that this is some bug, but till now I have gotten around it by dragging the magic window onto the monitor and then repeating the ctrl + F, and then it covers the whole screen. When I add the projector to the mix (as the third-chained output, using a HDMI cable), the same happens except when on the second fullscreen (which should be the monitor) now the image is on the right half of the monitor and the left half of the projector. On the third fullscreen in this setup it is only on the right half of the projector. Again, dragging the magic window to the monitor or projector output and then hitting fullscreen seems to work. Does that make sense?

I've tried varying the output resolution in magic and it doesn't make a difference. I have no idea what could be causing it, I've not noticed a similar splitting of the output in other applications. I can get around it by moving the magic window to the desired output before entering fullscreen, though I then don't have the magic window on my desktop screen for monitoring the output, which is the feature I was requesting here

Any ideas what' could be happening?

Hmm, that's strange. I haven't heard of that issue before. Dragging the Magic window shouldn't have any effect on the fullscreen behavior, nor should the resolution. You have a good graphics card, so I don't think that's the problem either. Do you think you could post a screenshot or two so I can see exactly what's going on?

Sorry for the delayed response, needed to have bit more time to do this.
So below should be three screenshots. The first is with magic opened on my laptop, and the colourful picture is the second output (my monitor). I left the magic output window in the default position within the program, then pressed CTRL + F so I have fullscreen on my laptop (screenshot 2). Then I pressed CTRL + F again to send the output to the monitor, where it displays on only half the screen (screenshot 3). If I attached a third output from my laptop, the image would be spread between the two (i.e. half on the monitor and half on the projector). Another note: the results are the same if I use a projector as a second output instead of the monitor.

Here is the same project, but this time I have dragged the magic output window across onto the second display (the monitor). Note that this time, after the first CTRL + F the fullscreen mode on the laptop does not completely cover the screen. On the second CTRL + F, the fullscreen mode on the monitor works fine. So this is what I have been doing - dragging the magic output window to the desired display before hitting fullscreen - I didn't realise till now that there was some problem with it. I wouldn't be surprised if it's some problem specific to my laptop, I always seem to be the one who encounters weird problems Anyway, let me know if there's any other info I could send you to help understand this.

Ok thanks very much for all that. It is very strange! I've never seen the fullscreen Magic window take up only part of the screen. I'll dig into the code and see if I can find anything that might be going wrong.

So to conclude, I solved this problem with Eric's advice. Here it is:
Windows 8 and 10 try to do DPI scaling on some applications so the fonts are easier to read. This actually changes the resolution that the application is running at, and it affects the fullscreen behavior.
To disable the scaling, open the folder where Magic is located (for example, C:\Program Files\Magic), right-click on Magic.exe, select Properties, go to the Compatibility tab, and select "Disable display scaling...".

Thanks . I will also make this easier to deal with in the next Magic release.