Laptop vga out to LCD tv (not a "no signal" problem)

[Keystr0ke]

i am wondering what i have to do to be able to watch videos on my television through my laptop. the video shows up on my laptop's monitor, but it just shows black space in the video player on my television. however, when i'm browsing the web, i can watch web videos and they work fine on my telly. when i try to watch divx or other formats in a player it only shows up on my laptop though. i've tried my default player (Media Player Classic) and i've also tried WMP 10. neither will show video on my tv. Thanks!

[psx_pirate]

Hmmm maybe it could be a resolution problem .... try changing the resolution (screen size) on your laptops graphics card ... right click an empty area on your desktop .. select properties ... the display properties dialog will open ... on here select settings and change the screen resolution to 800 x 600 and then click apply/ok .. (your laptops desktop will look a little weird ... large icons etc... don't panic) ... try playing a video and see if it works on your tv .... you can change the screen resolution back to normal once you have finished watching the video on your tv

If the above works then you could use kmplayer to play your videos as it can be set to automatically change the resolution while playing videos at full screen...

..... Quote from Jagabo (from a different thread)

you can force KMPlayer to use DirectX to open an 800x600 screen while playing. Right click on KMPlayer, select Options -> Preferences. In the left hand panel of the dialog that pops open select General -> Screen. In the right hand panel select the Advanced tab. In the middle of the dialog there is an option called "change resolution at full screen mode automatically". Set that to the video resolution you want. You may find that 640x480x32 works best (fot TV output) but try others too. The mode switch only happens when you set the player to full screen. There's an option to startup at fullscreen (it that's what you want) somewhere too.

The full thread can be found here http://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic...player#1691570

[jagabo]

Most media players use your graphics card's video overly feature (and most web players don't). The black space you see is a hole in the desktop through which the video is displayed. When overlay is used the graphics card handles tasks like converting YUV to RGB, scaling, etc. This reduces the amount of work the CPU has to do.

You can force many players not to use video overlay. Or you can disable it in the graphics card's setup applet. But then you lose many of the advanced features.

Most graphics cards have a feature whereby you can have a second monitor display the media player's contents full screen, even if the media player is windowed. ATI calls this "theater mode", nVidia calls it "video mirroring". But a laptop probably doesn't have the connections for a second display. So you may have to disable video overlay.

[Keystr0ke]

nice jagabo! i'm so glad you ran across my post! it worked like a charm in theater mode. my lappy has an ati in it. you, my friend, are my savior. thanks a lot a lot.