Support to Multimedia Presentations on Multi-head Setups

Multi-head setups are commonly used to enhance productivity and to increase the screen area of multimedia presentations. To support the latter, multimedia systems must have access to information about the display arrangement and about bezels and gaps between displays, to calculate the multi-head total resolution and to define the active exhibition area. Existent solutions oblige users to know the details of the display arrangement, and to map manually the logic display arrangement into the physical one. Even when they provide some features to easy this mapping, users have to pay attention on hardware details, and are limited to predefined display arrangements. In addition, users have to adhere to try-and-error calculations to achieve better results for setting bezel and gap values. This paper presents a mechanism to support multimedia presentations on multi-head setups that cracks the limitations found in the existent systems. The proposed mechanism has been integrated with the reference implementation of Ginga, the ITU-T H.761 IPTV middleware. However, the solution is generic and can be used with other multimedia systems.