I'm desperately seeking a solution for the following problem:

I've got a Compaq Armada M700 notebook with ATI Rage grafics chip and TV-out.
it works fine so far and I get everything to see on the TV that's showing on the laptop display. but when I play a DivX;-)Mpeg4 movie with media player (v6.4) I get only a black square on the TV, the laptop display shows the movie though. the rest of the desktop and other program windows are showing fine on the TV.
what puzzles me is that I have a ATI-all-in-wonder-128 in my other computer and when I use the TV-out on this card I can actually watch the DivX;-)Mpeg4 file on the TV using windows media player. everything is fine there. no black square in the media player window.
as far as I know both grafic cards are based on the same ATI Rage chip.
so why does the TV-out on the all-in-wonder shows me the movie and the TV-out on the laptop shows me a black square?
any help would be extremely welcome!!!

respect!

Sorry I cannot help but I have a similar problem that may be related. I am running a Radeon AIW and it works fine on both a monitor and a TV including playing DivX movies. My problem is trying to screen capture a DVD using clipboard. Clipboard will catch a freeze frame of a DivX movie but it will only get your black square when trying to catch a DVD. What is really weird is that the black square is transparent to a movie on the desktop so viewing a .clp image while a movie is playing will show some of the movie in the black square. If no movie is playing the square is just black. I suspect that my problem is that the DVD image is added later in hardware stream after windows software has let it go to the vid card. This would explain why DVD's will not capture (cause they use hardware decoding) and DivX will capture (cause it is all done in software). Of course this is all guesswork on my part, good luck with your problem. LD

the dvd and tv image is added later with overlay, which you can see if you are running about 15 programs at a time,which are are all busy and you try to move the window

a new version of the multimedia center apparently uses direct draw instead of overlay, since if you play mpeg-2 files while tv or dvd player is active, your system may freeze.

Ok now we are getting somewhere. At one time 3dfx cards could be used to hardware accelerate 2d movies even without specific MPEG hardware. If I remember correctly the idea was to use the movie as a texture on a flat surface "3d" surface. I don't know what "overlay" or "direct draw" are exactly but I have an idea... Try an older verson of Media Player or another player all together. Good luck! Gonna try this for my problem when I go home tonight.

I think this is all related to issues I have seen.

Windows in general will not display video on the non-primary display. I have used Dual Head Video cards and dual video cards to some success, however never got full screen video to work. Windowed video worked sometimes.

I think that because your laptop is effectively acting as a dual head video card (tv and LCD) it will only display on 1 output. What happens if you set it to tv out only - and use that as a monitor?

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@peteb

thanks a lot! you pointed me in the right direction.
all I had to do was setting the TV-OUT as the primary display and got the video fully shown on my Telly.
thanks again!

note: you wrote you never got full screen video to work on dual head cards. I have a ATI-all-in-wonder-128 in my other computer and I get full screen video on both displays (monitor and TV) at the same time. but you probably mean on two monitors.

respect!

Hmm - maybe I'll try that. Using a Matrox Dual Head card, the second display wouldn't show any video.

I stuck a second Vid card in my PC, and it would display windowed video, but not full screen.

Is the ATI128 a PCI card?

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dont think the newer ones are, but when i bought my 16 mb one, there was a pci one available, i went with agp tho.

yes the All-in-wonder-128 that I have in my machine is a 16MB PCI card.
not sure if ATI is still manufacturing them, so it might be a bit difficult to get hold of one. I got this one a year ago as a PCI because my computer back then didn't have an AGP port. but you might ask around here if the AGP version of the card supports full screen video on both displays at the same time as well.

respect!

PS: just 'been looking up some hardware vendor websites and apparently the PCI version is still available here in the UK. if you have trouble getting hold of one send me a message and I will see if I can help you.