Laptop wont display 'video' when using dual display (projector etc)

We have in the office some laptops which work fine, as in:- they will show DVD on the Laptop screen and DVD on the Projector (or 2nd source) without a hitch.

And others, which will, show the DVD playing on the laptop but display a black image on the 2nd source, or, if you choose to output solely to the 2nd source, will work fine, but obviously you have no visuals on the primary (laptop) so for presenting etc this aint too good.

Is it something as serious as GFX Chips ability. I know mines an ATI Mobile 9100 and works flawlessly, but the one im working with at the minute which has issues is an Nvidia 5200 GO. I also know one other Nvidia Go system to have this issue.

(but in the back of my mind have a feeling one of oour users who may be nvidia has it wrking)

or is it down to codec's ?

On the Nvidia struggly one, ive just uninstalled all codecs and installed KLite... This still hasnt helped. But i understand it could still be codecs.


I installed WMP10 too, to see if that helped. No Joy...


anyone got anything to offer?

In the Troubleshooting tab of your display properties reduce the hardware acceleration slider until the video appears.

There may be a better way of doing this through your cards drivers, but it is all to do with how the video overlay is handled.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Funkstar

In the Troubleshooting tab of your display properties reduce the hardware acceleration slider until the video appears.

There may be a better way of doing this through your cards drivers, but it is all to do with how the video overlay is handled.

---

if that works, it just proves the sheer greatness of ATI :bowdown:

[e!] but it didnt. it has about 6 settings, anything after reducing the acceleration by 2, and i lose directx/direct draw/dvd playback. and those '2' notches do nothing :(

ive just disabled 'enable write combining' and rebooting now.

[e! x2] nope, still no worky :(

if i can get hold of this 'maybe computer' and find out whether its ATI or Nvidia, i could have my solution.

oh well, worked on our toshiba laptops when i can into this problem a while back.

you could try MediaPlayer Classic http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...ease_id=403110

View -> Options -> Playback -> Output

Don't know what combination would work, but worth a shot. It's also a damned good media player

tried MPC and VLC :(

im happy to show users how to just output to one screen (that being the 2nd display)... mine works too :D

Is the display mode set to clone or 2 displays? Try the opposite to what its set as (ive got a feeling clone should work but not 2 displays)

This is caused by a limitation in the way your system's video driver handles overlay layers.

When doing video in a fast, GPU-accelerated manner, the OS displays a large coloured block (using some colour that is highly unlikely to be used elsewhere), and the GPU then puts the video playback on top of the marked region. This is one reason why you can't just press printscreen to grab frames from video - you don't catch the overlay layer.

The issue is that your drivers appear to only do overlay on one output at a time - not both. Decreasing your "acceleration" slider actually forces the OS to pretend you lack certain features - including overlay - making it do CPU-hungry software-based blitting instead of accelerated overlay playback.

I don't have any bright ideas for fixing it on a Windows-based nVidia setup - I've got solutions for Linux-with-Intel though. That said, generally speaking, any driver which can do a pure display clone on both outputs should be fine (the problem happens where both displays need to be coordinated seperately rather than directly cloned)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by herulach

Is the display mode set to clone or 2 displays? Try the opposite to what its set as (ive got a feeling clone should work but not 2 displays)

---

tried both.

ill give the drivers and update to see if that does owt.

As directx said it might be overlay only suppported one one screen (the primary screen) by the driver, and the 5200, been a 200 aka crap this might well be the problem. Some codec's such as Real<ly bad>player only support output to the primary screen. Do you need it to be displayed on both? If not select both to be primary.

Have you tried a display span? Some device drivers let you span a single monitor accross two displays. The reason this works where as two seperate monitors in windows dosen't is because of the way the graphics card handles the refresh rates of the displays.

Other than that the only way would be to use software writing to the video system via standard GDI systems..... not nice.

you ought to be able to force an unaccelerated software display mode in the advanced VLC settings - i don't have a windows host to test, but on Linux the list includes OpenGL, XVideo (overlay) and X11 (unaccelerated)

that way you don't cripple the whole system, but get it to work in the short term

Ctrl + S
Video -> Output Modules | tick advanced options

its worth saying with MPEG stuff, it crawls.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by TheAnimus

Ctrl + S
Video -> Output Modules | tick advanced options

its worth saying with MPEG stuff, it crawls.

---

Well, VLC running in Windows GDI mode (using the above) works... Is there a way to set this as a system wide setting for all video players or is VLC just too damn cool?

you can turn off overlays in the performance-advanced section of the wmp options

I'm assuming you've used nVidia stuff to set it too dualview mode?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by TheAnimus

I'm assuming you've used nVidia stuff to set it too dualview mode?

---

Not touched it, left it as default.

ah that might well be the problem. Trouble free way of getting the drivers to play well.

switch off laptop, plug in projector, switch on laptop, display properties -> adanvanced.

Geforce 5200 tab -> "nView Display Settings" -> nView Display Mode, Dual View.