PC to TV

[Ironhand]

EDIT: Never mind. Realized what I was doing wrong. This was one of those times where simply writing the problem down, made the solution clear to me. In my graphic card's clone settings I had kept my PC's LCD as the primary display with the TV as secondary. I realized that's why I had to manually change the LCD's resolution to match the TV. By setting the TV to be 'primary', however, and the LCD as secondary, I can now see everything.

 

I'll leave this here in case this might be a help for anyone else. Take care, folks.

 

 

PROBLEM:

 

Yesterday I hooked my computer up to my 27" TV (standard picture tube) using the S-Video output from my GeForce 6800 GT card figuring it'd be fun to watch some of the videos I've downloaded and some track files on the larger screen. I went into my graphics card settings, selected "clone" with my LCD as primary display and my TV as secondary.

 

I can see the Desktop fine, though I had to change the resolution to 1024x768 to get the whole thing to show up on the TV screen. I can watch track files fine. I can watch streaming video fine (happened to be using RealPlayer at the time). But when I try to play things off my hard drive using either RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, the "movie screen" portion of the player just shows black on the TV where the video ought to display. Making it full screen just makes the entire TV screen black. Yet everything is visible on my PC's LCD. Any ideas?

 

Rich

[zaelu]

I think your players that shows that black screen are using what is called "Ovelay rendering" (if I don't confuse the terms :) ) that means that the player is using "another leyer" for the movie, different from the one picked up by the video board to show on the TV... the frame of the player par example is on the first.

 

The solution can be found in the options of the player as a option related to "video overlay rendering mode". simplest would be to force to RGB space (the first standard leyer I think) which merge the leyer of the movie with the normal leyer shown on the TV... thus making the movie seenable.

 

Something like this hapens when you try to "print screen" in a movie... you will capture the frame of the player and the rest of your desktop but not the actual picture. thus you need to use the players special capture capabilities.

 

 

I prefer using "Media Player classic" because it can playback practicaly anything (DVDs included), suports subtitles display (another thigie rendered diferent most of the time :) ).

Also Media Player Classic with the aid of "Real Alternative" and "Quicktime Alternative" codecs can render movies made in those (quite bad IMHO) formats without problems. If something realy refuses to playback... then I use "heavy artilery"... the VLC Player (Video Lan Client Player) a stand alone player that dont uses normaly codecs in the system opening virtualy anything.

 

This is how Option window in Media Player classic look like:

 

You can find "Media Player Classic", "Real Alternative" and "Quicktime Alternative" codecs, "VLC Player" and the most common codecs (latest versions and more) here: http://www.free-codecs.com/ .

[Ironhand]

Zaelu,

 

Thank you. Once again you've helped immensely. Never realized that the video image was produced on a different "layer". I made the changes you suggested and it works like a charm.

 

Thanks again.

 

Rich