Media player content on the telly

[annie_m]

Hope this is the right place for this, but here goes.

Now, I won't go into the why's & wherefore's, but I wish to display the output of our laptop on the TV screen using the laptop's S-video output. After a lot of delving, enabling, and settings changing I managed to get it going.

Now, the problem is that content pane (ie movies, video files...) on WMP, NERO & other players refuses to display anything other than a black rectangle, although all other displayed content is fine (desktop, files, media player shell etc). Also streamed video from Youtube is ok.

Anyone got any ideas?

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite A60

[Boris]

Have you got the necessary codecs installed ?

[annie_m]

TBH, I have no idea!!

The players are as they come. Is there a useful website for this kind of thing?

[Boris]

Try this - every codec you wil need ..... K-Lite Codec Pack
/>http://www.free-codecs.com/download/k_lite_codec_pack.htm

[annie_m]

Try this - every codec you wil need ..... K-Lite Codec Pack
/>http://www.free-codecs.com/download/k_lite_codec_pack.htm

Thank you Boris. I'll give it a go & report back with the results.

[bludgard]

Try this - every codec you wil need ..... K-Lite Codec Pack
/>http://www.free-codecs.com/download/k_lite_codec_pack.htm

Thank you Boris. I'll give it a go & report back with the results.

Fixed yet?I'm curious as to how this worked out....

[MANEMAN]

Yeah me too.

I was thinking along the lines of a hardware acceleration problem, or perhaps the output from some of the software from the laptop having the ability to being set to to the wrong standard for the country. ( PAL,SECAM,NTSC, and all of their derivatives )

We will just have to wait and see.

John.

[annie_m]

Hi guys. Yes, sorry it's been a bit of a while to update this, but I've managed to get it going.

I eventually got round to loading the K_Lite package, but was still getting no joy. Until I had another wander around the Video Settings. In the advanced settings along with the switches for TV, ext monitor etc, I found a hotkey selection menu for 'Media Controls' which I guessed to mean the player hardware buttons on the keyboard. In the list is one for TV output. So I set a spare key as TV & when pressed, aeverything works lovely.

There are a couple of idiosyncracies(?):

1 - You can't have output on the laptop monitor and the TV at the same time - I suspect it's physically switching the data stream somewhere in its bowels.

2 - If the content is in full screen mode on the monitor, when you switch it reverts to 'window' mode, so you need to full screen it again.

Small annoyances. I'm just happy to have it doing what I needed.

A.