vlc-playing DVD won't display on external monitor

[Michael Hennebry]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

> Quoting "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>:
>
>>  ok, as a followup to my previous post, i slapped f9 on
>> my inspiron, then VLC and associated RPMs, popped in a DVD,
>> it plays nicely on the laptop.
>>
>>  then, connected an external (samsung WUXGA) flat-panel
>> monitor via DVI, and the entire laptop display is reflected
>> nicely on the monitor *except* for the actual DVD image in
>> the VLC window -- that just shows up as blank, either in
>> regular or fullscreen mode (in fullscreen mode, the entire
>> external display is blank, even while the movie is playing
>> on the laptop).
>>
>>  i'm no expert at video so, somehow, the DVD image is
>> not being passed out on DVI, while everything else is.
>> thoughts?  is there a VLC setting to tweak this?  this is
>> a dell inspiron 9200 so it's a fairly old system -- at
>> least a couple years.  but until now, running external
>> displays off that DVI port has worked just fine.  so
>> why is the DVD video content being treated this way?

I thhink that part of the problem is that the laptop is exporting a
framebuffer and the DVD image isn't going through that frame buffer.
Does the laptop use hardware acceleration?

When I tried to xwd an mplayer image,
there was just a single color where the image should have been.
Anyone know how to screendump from mplayer without
guessing the time or making multiple images?

> ok, i just realized what the problem is -- the onboard
> video simply isn't powerful enough to display the playing
> movie both on the laptop display and on the external display,
> so i simply need to disable the laptop display.  and one
> would think this would be easy -- there is a blue "CRT/LCD"
> on F8, leading me to conclude that a simple Fn/F8 should do
> it.
>
> sadly, that key combo has no effect.  how odd, since it's
> *exactly* what i want to do -- disable onboard video and
> drive external video.  i will now google, but if someone knows
> how to get that on an inspiron 9200, i am *so* interested
> in hearing it.

-- 
Michael   hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu
"Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
Optimist:   The glass is half full.
Engineer:   The glass is twice as big as it needs to be."