Hooking up my TV to my computers s-video out. (Please help)

Ok, I went ahead and bought a Big Projection DTV for 400 dollars (used), HD1080 series Mitsubishi. I am happy with the purchase and now am ready to have a bunch of you over to watch good movies.

Anyway, I went ahead and hooked the TV's "input 1" into my computer through a 20 foot s-video cable. After about 20 minutes of fiddling with both the computer and TV I got the TV to display a clone image of my desktop. My computer is a Dell 8200, 1 gig ram, 2 ghz pentium processor, nvidea g-force mx-400 and I have the latest drivers.

Works fine except when I play a video on my computer. Then the area of my desktop that shows the movie is black on the TV, though the movie is playing fine on my computer monitor. I have tried multiple video programs. High framerate videogames showup on the TV with no problem.

I have gone through the troubleshooter and found nothing on this.

Can anyone give me some clues here? Any information you guys need? I am very frustrated.

Reply to
michalchik
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There are two ways to render a movie with a movie player application. In the preferences for the movie player, you may find an "overlay plane" option. There is only one overlay plane, and there are two output connectors on the video card. The movie will only play on one connector.

An alternative render option, is "VMR9". That can work on two screens at once. So give that option a try.

And like anything, YMMV.

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Paul

Reply to
Paul

what is "vmr9" and "ymmv", for tha matter I am a little fuzzy on what an "alternative render option" is.

Reply to
michalchik

Google says....

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Google says....

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Google is your friend. It will help you avoid asking silly questions in public.

Google isn't perfect. If offered some links about butchering cattle, etc. :-) Perhaps Paul will clarify.

OTOH, did you read Paul's suggested URL?

Reply to
Richard Crowley

1) Open the preferences for the movie player. 2) There may be a rendering option in there. The options would be "Overlay plane" or VMR9. In Windows Media Player, it might be Tools/Options/Performance/Advanced.

YMMV is "your mileage may vary", which translated means your results may be better or worse than the link I posted.

I'm not sure I can find a nice English description of the difference between overlay and VMR. Overlay is a hardware feature, but I've never been able to find a reference that explained why there is only one overlay possible. Even though video cards now are dual head, and effectively two channels from head to tail, implying they could do two independent things, without one channel needing to bother the other channel. They even show in device manager, as two objects. It just doesn't make sense to me, that they'd share a resource between those two channels.

I think one possible feature of overlay planes, is perhaps hardware can DMA into it directly, for stuff like TV tuner cards and the like. So it may have applications where software is not involved.

VMR is another means to get to the screen, but seems to involve more references to DirectShow/DirectDraw/DirectX than the overlay thing. It is more of a software path, and makes more sense when a movie is being decompressed in software, and rendered on the screen.

And as an end user, you can certainly test the feature, and see whether the results are good enough to use or not. If there is an uncorrectable color cast to the results, you may end up going back to what you were doing.

You can see another example here.

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Post back how it works out.

Paul

Reply to
Paul

Try changing the control panel > display settings to make the TV the primary display. Some graphics cards can only render 1 video output (on the primary display). Or you can try not using clone mode, just output to TV. Or use Extended Desktop mode.

Reply to
bucky3

Propriety is also your friend. It will help you avoid being rude.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

Paul's on the right track here. The video card is handling the movie playback using it's own onboard chips. That hardware acceleration means it may or may not be able to put the video out onto both outputs at once. You may want to check how the Display control panel is configured for the card. There's usually a slider control for 'hardware acceleration'. Changing that may affect whether the video plays out both at once. Bearing in mind, of course, that this will likely also affect gaming program speeds.

You don't mention which movie player program you're using. Some have the option of controlling which form of output they attempt to use. DirecX, hardware, etc. One versatile player I like to use is VLC (video lan client).

And as always, STFW for answers. As in, Search The eFf'ing Web. It likewise works great for abbreviations.

Reply to
Bill Kearney

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