Once upon a time, nVidia cared about us. The nVidia control panel was hard to use but pretty slick and it had one feature that I thought was absolutely great: There was a video overlay feature that would automatically clone any video output from either screen in full screen on a screen you specify.
In Linux I can simulate this by selecting a screen for full screen output, and VLC will comply without hesitation every time I go to fullscreen mode and every time I add a file to the playlist...it opens in full screen ON THAT SCREEN no matter where the VLC window is.
Windows has befuddled my every attempt to do this. In Direct X output mode video uses the wrong aspect ratio in XP and forces Vista to change from Aero to Vista Basic, and displays on a portion of the video. (Your milage may vary). And OpenGL requires me to move 51% of my window to the other screen, but then if the next video on the playlist starts and I have moved the window to a different screen, it full screens there. Usually on top of my work.
After some experimenation using VLC 0.8.6i on Windows Server 2008 I have managed to get an affect that is close to my Linux experience.
The final result is this: A VLC player with controls, but no video in the main window and video automatically playing in full screen, on the same screen each time (even after the next video in the playlist.)
First enable full screen off the bat so you don't need to force the video into full screen when you start VLC the first time:
1. Go into the settings menu and open preferences, check the box that says "Advanced Options"
2. Select the "Video" section from the box on the left.
3. Check the box that says "Fullscreen Video Output"
4. Scroll the main settings area down to place where you can see "Window Properties"
"Video Height" and "Video Width" should be set to the height and width of the screen you will be viewing your full screen video on. (In this iteration of the technique this is not strictly necessary, but is a leftover from experimentation with the "clone" video filter which would allow video in both the main window and the extra screen)
In my case this is 1024x768 screen.
5. The next 2 options will be Video X and Video Y. In my case, my 1024x768 screen is to the right of a 1280x1024 screen. So I set Video Y to 0, so it's at the top of the screen, and Video X to 1280 so that it will be in the left corner.
6. Further down the window will be another box for "Window decorations". Uncheck it.
7. The very last option on the left should be "Interface", expand this, and then expand "Main interface". Select "wxWidgets" from this list. Unceck the options for "Embed video in interface" and "Size to video"
While this is incredibly involved and rather inflexible, it does get me video the way I'd generally watch it and could hopefully be of use to someone else.
As a note I already tried getting Windows Media Play, MPlayer, and Media Play Classic to behave the way I want them to (like VLC/Linux) but had no luck. MPlayer wouldn't even play ANY video on my other screen.
--PXA
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3 comments:
just wondering how much you worked on this issue? The reason I ask is that VLC for windows does not allow you to move a window once you turn off windows decorations (fine for full screen) but you said you were working with the clone feature I'm trying to clone a window several times on the same display with no window decorations but I can't move any of the video windows which is odd.
@Martin Claude Getting the final working setup took me about an hour or so. As far as I know, unless have some sort of 3rd party window manager or program which would allow you to move windows indirectly. Think along the lines of the Pager in KDE if you're familiar with linux. In VLC I'm not even sure if the clone counts as its own window or if all the clones will tile in 1 window. If you find out anything cool I'd love to know about it.
I've been having all sorts of problems running programs on the particular screen I want on Windows. Thanks for this explaination. I was finally able to get VLC to open consistently on my TV.
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