Dual Monitor Support

[reggie14]

I know this issue comes up all the time, but I couldn't find an old topic that really seemed to fit well.

I just hooked up a second monitor to by 6600GT video card. I knew VRM9 wouldn't work correctly with dual monitors;whenever I try to play a video in Sage on the secondary monitor it pegs the CPU. I was hoping overlay would work, but I don't get any video then on the secondary monitor.

However, the Placeshifter works fine on both the primary and secondary monitors. My understanding is that uses overlay. Is the fact I'm using the PureVideo decoder giving me problems getting Sage to play nicely with dual monitors?

A second minor issue that someone might be able to help me with is if I have Sage running fullscreen on the primary monitor when I click on the secondary monitor the taskbar shows up over top of the Sage window on the primary. Presumably this is a Windows thing, so I don't know if its possible to do anything about.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I just hooked up a second monitor to by 6600GT video card. I knew VRM9 wouldn't work correctly with dual monitors;whenever I try to play a video in Sage on the secondary monitor it pegs the CPU. I was hoping overlay would work, but I don't get any video then on the secondary monitor.

VMR9 needs to run on the primary, since that is where DirectX works the best, but you can set your 2nd monitor to be the primary monitor on the Settings tab of Windows' Display Properties.

I use overlay on my secondary monitor. This usually comes down to whether your video card's driver and your decoder support it. Also, you should be extending the desktop onto the 2nd monitor instead of using clone mode... but I believe you are already doing that, based on your other comments...

However, the Placeshifter works fine on both the primary and secondary monitors. My understanding is that uses overlay.

Yes, the Placeshifter uses overlay for playback.

A second minor issue that someone might be able to help me with is if I have Sage running fullscreen on the primary monitor when I click on the secondary monitor the taskbar shows up over top of the Sage window on the primary. Presumably this is a Windows thing, so I don't know if its possible to do anything about.

There could be otehr things do do, but maybe put the task bar on your secondary monitor?

- Andy

[reggie14]

Actually, its mostly watchable under VRM9 under the secondary monitor, it just completely kills one of my CPU cores. It doesn't seem like an ideal situation.

What decoder do you use? Presumablely the purevideo decoder supports overlay, since I saw the setting in the decoder properties screen to prefer overlay. And, after changing that setting and the setting in Sage, I definitely noticed dramatically worse picture quality, which I thought was odd. And of course, the video was still not working correctly with the dual monitors.

I just noticed that things work fine if I switch to the nvidia post processor. That uses a lot more CPU power, but it seems to work fine. Do you have any ideas why the normal purevideo decoder doesn't work correctly for me?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Actually, its mostly watchable under VRM9 under the secondary monitor, it just completely kills one of my CPU cores.

That's because DirectX is using software emulation for the secondary monitor, instead of hardware acceleration.

What decoder do you use?
...
Do you have any ideas why the normal purevideo decoder doesn't work correctly for me?

For viewing in my office using overlay, I'm just using the basic InterVideo decoder that came with a Hauppauge card. I don't have the purevideo decoder, so I was leaving all comments about it for someone else to handle.

- Andy

[reggie14]

Its nice that I've gotten things working with overlay, but I'm still a little disappointed with dual monitor support. Other applications, notably Windows Media Player, work on both the primary and secondary monitors. It must be using VMR instead of overlay since I can play multiple videos at once, or run it alongside Sage. Is it possible to get Sage to work similarly?