The Disappearing Movie--A Short Tale of a Laptop & Video Projector

[solarblast]

I bought a new Gateway laptop a few days ago to work with my Epson Powerlite S3 video projector. The other night the laptop was used to preview a rough cut of a short movie. The projector used was a $7000 Sanyo. Using either PowerDVD or WMP, the video could be seen on the laptop but not simultaneously on the large screen used by the Sanyo. Although the images occupied 3/4 of the laptop's screen, only the video was missing on the large projection screen. Desktop icons and PowerDVD could be seen. I then tried this at home with my Epson. Same result.

I called the Geek Patrol at the Gateway store about 10 minutes before it closed last night. The tech said he had seen the problem before, not necessarily with the combos I described. The solution was to show the video on only one device, the laptop or the projector.

The XP display icon apparently controls what combo of the two devices can be used. We couldn't work the solution out over the phone before the store closed. The graphics card is by ATI, and they augment the familiar Display icon with a dialog that looks like their own. It may just be the newest way XP deal with the display. It was not obvious to me how to just get one of the two devices, the projector, to operate without the other. Perhaps someone out there has a solution.

I'll pursue this much later this morning with Gateway. Possibly this is a driver problem. MX 6453 laptop by Gateway.

[guns1inger]

It basically comes down to drivers and overlay settings. Update to the latest ATI drivers for your laptop/card combo. I have a Toshiba notebook that is unfortunately cursed with Intel graphics. It can display to two devices simultaneously, however video is noticably jerky when doing this, and is only smooth when playing to a single device.

[solarblast]

Yes, likely drivers. What is an overlay setting? How are they different from drivers?

(I was surprised to find anyone awake at this time, but I see you are almost 1/2 way around the globe. 3 am here. Yawn.)

[guns1inger]

Overlay is the method directX uses to display video. Think of it as a leyer above the player with the video in it. The overlay controls will be accessable either through the drivers or the player when ever video is being played. You can control gamma, colour etc as well as other features.

[Nitemare]

Or try a different program to play it. My unc le had this same problem and we corrected it (a few years ago) by using RealPlayer to play the video.

He was presenting the video to NASA (for his job) so he needed it to work RIGHT NOW. Not sure if updated versions of RealPlayer work or not. I haven't heard from my uncle so either it still works or he's tried something else.

[guns1inger]

Friends don't let friends install Real Player. It sucks the life out of your machine, and installs more crap than Nero (OK, exaggeration. Only Windows in more bloated than Nero. Real comes a close third).

If you cannot even get the desktop to appear on the projector then the player itself is not the issue.

[olyteddy]

Power DVD has the option to not use overlay. In mine (ver 4) you can turn off acceleration on the Config -> Video tab.

[solarblast]

The Gateway video drivers for my laptop were posted as recently as 10/06/06. They are 76M of data. That's quite a large chunk for my modem to download, so I'll rent a little time at an internet cafe. I'll call Gateway first and see if there's a part of this I really need. On the question of layering, I would guess layering might be corrected by the bundle of drivers? That is, it's not done somewhere outside the realm of my laptop, correct?

[jagabo]

Enable Theater mode in the ATI display drivers.

[Nitemare]

Friends don't let friends install Real Player.

I don't use it myself so I didn't know! Just giving an example.