Lots of internet video sites like hulu, youtube, tv network sites, etc. have a “full screen” option. Great. Now, I have 2 monitors and I want to use one to display a full screen image from one of those sites, and on the other I want to be able to view web pages or anything else.
Problem is, as soon as I click another window other than the video player, it instantly shrinks to non-full screen size again.
Is there any trick I can use to keep it full screened even while doing other things?
I’d imagine so. Aren’t dual monitors made specifically for that purpose? Maximizing a window only makes it as big as one monitor. I’ve only used one once so I can’t really give you any actual info on it. I’m sure someone will chime in though.
With normal windows, that’s true - I can maximize seperately in either window - but the video players are programs within a web browser, they don’t operate the same way. In order to get the full screen feed, you have to hit a specific full screen button within that program.
Try as I may, I’ve never gotten this to work in Windows, for the reason stated above.
Here’s a less-than-ideal solution: Try Linux.
Some of their default window managers (like GNOME) are configured so that you do not need to be “active” in a window to scroll in it, so technically, you could have a fullscreen youtube video playing on one monitor, and be scrolling happily on the other, as long as you didn’t click on the window.
Not a very elegant solution, I agree.
Edit: I actually just remembered something that might help - some youtube videos have the ability to “pop out” the video player from within the little box in the page. Example. Not all videos have this feature though, but if it does, you could pop it out, maximize that window, and have the “fullscreen-like” video playing in a pop-up window.
The one “solution” I’ve tried is to make the resolution in the second monitor really small (480x640 or something) so that the movie plays at much closer to full screen size. Otherwise, I just put up with it.
On Linux, you could make two separate X Sessions for the screen, and I’m pretty sure that one session wouldn’t know anything about the other one. Of course, if you do that, you’d have to give up being able to drag windows from one screen to the other. It’d be like having two completely separate logins side by side.
Don’t think Windows or Mac OS will let you do that sort of thing, but it’s possible.
In the case of YouTube videos without the popout option, you can try this. Take the “embed” code, strip everything except the actual URL, and use that URL to bring up the video. This fills the tab/browser window.
You could also download the video and play it however you want. There are Firefox extensions to download videos that work for most flash video sites. I use one called DownloadHelper, for example.
Youtube and related sites use Adobe Flash for the presentation of their videos. Flash’s built-in “fullscreen” effect is specifically designed to disable itself if you change windows. The reasoning behind this is that one could conceivably create a false fullscreen interface that looks like, say, your email client or credit card login site, and harvest personal information from unsuspected users.
If you really want to play flash video fullscreen, it is possible to extract the video content from Youtube and most other sites. Google “rip youtube”.
[QUOTE=Casserole;11213620
Some of their default window managers (like GNOME) are configured so that you do not need to be “active” in a window to scroll in it, so technically, you could have a fullscreen youtube video playing on one monitor, and be scrolling happily on the other, as long as you didn’t click on the window.[/QUOTE]
The behavior you mention here is called “focus follows mouse”, as opposed to “focus follows click”, which is the Windows behavior. Actually the new window you’re scrolling in is “active” (has focus), it’s just that the window manager only requires the cursor to be over a window in order to give it focus, it doesn’t require that you click on it. I think this method is much better than focus follows click, mostly for reasons like the OP and similar.
You can set up that behavior with registry tweaking, IIRC, in windows. I don’t see how that would help the situation though, wouldn’t it just make the window drop from full screen when my mouse moved away from it rather than when I clicked?
No, like Commander Keen mentioned, the difference is in the window being “active”, and the window having “focus”.
An active window would be scrollable, but not interactable (ironic choice of words here), but a focused window will get all of the attention (keyboard and mouse), and the title bar will change to reflect that (changing from grey to blue, or however Windows Vista does it)
