Tonight I was helping to set up a presentation for a meeting at our church. We had a laptop computer (Win XP) hooked up to an LCD projector so that they could watch a short DVD presentation. When we tried to play the DVD in WMP it looked fine on the laptop screen, but on the projector all that showed up was the WMP “skin”. The video inside the skin did not show up.
We finally switched to a different laptop, and found that the situation was reversed. The complete video showed up on the projector, but on the laptop screen only the skin showed up.
Is there a setting in WMP that toggles this behavior? Please note, I’m not talking about the Fn/F5 or whatever that toggles the entire display between the laptop and the VGA port. I’m wondering why only part of the screen image displays on the projector, or in the opposite case on the laptop.
I’ve found funny things with WMP on my dual-monitor setup - it’ll only play in fullscreen mode on the primary monitor. I can only assume that, as far as XP is concerned, the projector is the second monitor, so this is the resulting problem (and vice versa on the second laptop).
You might want to try a different player - DivX Player works fine on the second monitor (but actually has problems on the primary, apparently due to different resolutions…)
In my experience it’s not really a problem with WMP (I’ve tried several different players on my laptop), it’s that the projector/TV needs to be the primary display. I don’t know why, but I think that DVD video is only written directly to the video memory of the primary display and is not written to the video memory for the secondary display (for performance reasons, maybe).
The easiest way to display the video on the projector that I’ve found is to press fn-F5 until only the projector screen is displayed, then startup your DVD software (in this case WMP). You can then press fn-F5 to get both the projector and the LCD to display, although you will only see the video on the projector.
You can also right click on your desktop (with both screens active), select “Properties”, find the video settings and click “Advanced”. You should find an option to set the projector as the primary display there. Then startup WMP and your video should play on the projector.
The video card in the laptop has a limitation in that it cannot display video on the video overlay on both the LCD screen, and the video out port. They have some technical reason for this, but as the end user, it is annoying!
To get around this, you can disable the video overlay, which will result in not as high of quality of video, but it will be shown on both the lcd and the video out.
To do this, you can change your video settings in either WMP or in Windows Display Properties.
In WMP, go to Tools->Options and select the Performance tab. On the bottom of the dialog, there should be a Video Acceleration area. Hit the “Advanced…” button, and you will have lots of options dealing with video hardware acceleration. Of interest to you are “Use video mixing renderer” and “Use overlays”. Try disabling one or both of those and see how it affects the video image on your laptop video output.
Let me know if this fixes or doesn’t fix your problem!