I have a client who wants to set up a corporate-learning style classroom full of computers. (If you can see the attached diagram, it might help.)

Teacher stand up front and all the students sit at their computers.

Teacher throws a switch and all the students screens show exactly what is on the teachers screen, they can watch, but not control.

Teacher switches again and starts playing a video in a VCR. All the students screens show this video playing in sync. Teacher can also play mpeg files on his computer and have those show on the student screens.

All of this is simultaneously shown on a projector.


For the first part I would use RealVNC set in view-only mode, and I think that would work well.

But the second part I am not sure. They do not want to do a hardware solution. They are not happy that the video is playing on the projection screen, they want it to play on each students screen simultaneously. I don’t think that VNC can handle that. I need some kind of multicasting software, or router, but I am not even sure where to start searching.

How would you do this?

http://tinyurl.com/m5fmv/diagram.png