Using multiple screens

This section covers using multiple displays and screens.

Distinction between displays, windows and screens

The MPF media controller knows windows and displays. A window is the window where MPF-MC pops up on your desktop using kivy. Internally, MPF can have multiple displays which are internal viewports and can be targeted by slides. A display can either be displayed on a window or on one or more DMDs. Additionally, a display can also show one or more other displays using display widgets. MPF does not know about screens which are phyiscal monitors connected to your machine. However, the kivy window can span multiple screens.

Using multiple screens on your PC

Some machines use more than one screen. Unfortunately, kivy (the graphics framework we use) does only support one screen and cannot easily be started two times. This is mostly caused by OpenGL which is rarely used to render multiple windows. The simplest solution to this problem is to extend the MC window to span both (or more) screens. This can be achieved using the following config:

kivy_config:
 kivy:
   desktop: 1
   exit_on_escape: true
   pause_on_minimize: 0
   log_dir:
   window_icon:

 graphics:
   borderless: true
   window_state: visible  # visible, hidden, maximized, minimized
   fbo: hardware  # hardware, software, force-hardware
   fullscreen: false
   left: 0
   top: 0
   width: 3840    # width of display1 + display2
   height: 1080   # common height (or the maximum of both)
   maxfps: 30
   multisamples: 2
   position: custom  # auto, custom
   show_cursor: true
   resizable: false
   rotation: 0

 displays:
   display1:
      width: 1920
      height: 1080
   display2:
      width: 1920
      height: 1080
   combined_display:
      width: 3840
      height: 1080

 slides:
   base_slide:
      - type: display
        source_display: display1
        width: 1920
        height: 1080
        x: left
        anchor_x: left
      - type: display
        source_display: display2
        width: 1920
        height: 1080
        x: right
        anchor_x: right

 slide_player:
   mc_ready:
      base_slide:
         target: combined_display

This example is tested to be valid MPF config. However, it is not integration tested.

kivy_config:
 kivy:
   desktop: 1
   exit_on_escape: true
   pause_on_minimize: 0
   log_dir:
   window_icon:

 graphics:
   borderless: true
   window_state: visible  # visible, hidden, maximized, minimized
   fbo: hardware  # hardware, software, force-hardware
   fullscreen: false
   left: 0
   top: 0
   width: 3840    # width of display1 + display2
   height: 1080   # common height (or the maximum of both)
   maxfps: 30
   multisamples: 2
   position: custom  # auto, custom
   show_cursor: true
   resizable: false
   rotation: 0

 displays:
   display1:
      width: 1920
      height: 1080
   display2:
      width: 1920
      height: 1080
   combined_display:
      width: 3840
      height: 1080

 slides:
   base_slide:
      - type: display
        source_display: display1
        width: 1920
        height: 1080
        x: left
        anchor_x: left
      - type: display
        source_display: display2
        width: 1920
        height: 1080
        x: right
        anchor_x: right

 slide_player:
   mc_ready:
      base_slide:
         target: combined_display

Use width and height to set the size of the window. left and top are used to position the window.

We created one window which spans both screens. Then we define a display combined_display which will be displayed on startup by the slide base_slide spanning both screens. base_slide contains two widgets which show the displays display1 and display2. You can now target any slides to those two displays. See Display Widget for details.

Using multiple displays

You can easily use two DMDs and one LCD (or two LCDs with the solution above). To implement that you need to define multiple displays. One diplay per DMD and one for your LCD. If you want to show your DMDs on the LCD (i.e. during development) you can also define a fourth display and create a slide which contains three display widgets to show the other three displays.