Multiple Monitor setup

[radius9]

I recently put together a HTPC Sage box that has a built in Xenarc touchscreen. The HTPC is also connected to my HDTV. The xenarc can display a # of different resolutions, but 1920x1080p is not one of them. My TV is connected using the HDMI out, and it is displaying 1920x1080p. If I set my monitors to clone, then the TV is either at a lower resolution, or I cannot use the touchscreen. If I set it to span between the two monitors, then the sage is either on the touchscreen, or on the TV, but not both. What I would like to do at least, is have the touchscreen display the Sage menus, but have the TV display the video out. What I would ideally like is that the sage menu shows up on both monitors, and the video out only on the TV. How would I go about configuring this? I have searched through the forums, and everyone who I found multi-monitor was only using one monitor or the other, and not both. Any advice?

[paulbeers]

Since no one else has posted....I'll throw my .02 worth in. I have used many vid cards for dual monitor setups and I have never been able to clone to different resolutions. In fact at work, I use a laptop and a stand alone LCD and when in clone mode my widescreen laptop and stanard 4:3 monitor share the same resolution which means my widescreen laptop ends up looking askew.

I think you are out of luck trying to use clone mode to get stuff to show up on both of them and while I haven't tried it as my house is now entirely media extenders, I am not aware of any way to show the gui on one screen and video on the other.

One thing you could try is the web interface. I have never used it myself, but there is a plug in to control sage via a web interface. Maybe you use the window's spanning mode and set different resolutions for each monitor with the web interface running on the Xenarc? Like I said, I have never used it myself and have no idea how it would look on a small screen, but that's an alternative.

[radius9]

This is probably more a software question now, but I could theoretically use the SageTV client too right? I could put the client on one screen, and run the server on a second. It seems that conceptually it would actually work fairly well, because the xenarc won't be showing the video that's on the TV, I can have the remote control only on the TV, and the touchscreen would just be used to play music and what not. I haven't found any documentation on the SageTV client though, so I'm not sure that it would work.

[Humanzee]

That would work, however, one screen will not clone the other. If you were able to run sageclient and server on the same machine, it would appear like you were running two separate instances of the server software you are already familiar with. However, I'm guessing that you may have a difficult time setting that up. You could probably run the placeshifter software on the same machine as the server. This will not work as a clone either but its another option.

[CollinR]

I dunno but maybe a PVR350s output to the touchscreen???

Worst case go buy a good scaler and be done with it.

[emok]

I believe both nvidia and ati video cards allow some type configuration where overlay will be displayed on a secondary display. These are controlled by the NVidia Control Panel-->Video & Television-->Modify full-screen video options OR in the catalyst control center configuration I believe it's called Theater Mode.

I haven't really used this, but I would imagine this would satisfy your "at least" requirement where Sage would be displayed in the primary display (the small lcd) and the overlay video would be output to the tv. I think you'd just need to configure sage to use the overlay renderer.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Since no one else has posted....I'll throw my .02 worth in. I have used many vid cards for dual monitor setups and I have never been able to clone to different resolutions.

This is sort of off topic, since it's not a practical suggestion, but I'm pretty sure my old Matrox G400 Max could do that. That was a nice video card back in the day...

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by reggie14

This is sort of off topic, since it's not a practical suggestion, but I'm pretty sure my old Matrox G400 Max could do that. That was a nice video card back in the day...

Hmm. Very possible. The Matrox G400 was a great dual video card back in the day, but I never owned one. Back then I was using seperate vid cards (1 AGP and 1 PCI) to run dual monitors.

[wbarber69]

Look the best thing you could do is run sage like it is and run firefox in fullscreen kiosk mode with the web interface plugin use the webremote page from that you could even make your own buttons to fit your taste in gui and all of that can be resized to fit on the touchscreen its easy requires no extra client licenses and can be done in about 10 minutes

[Yooper]

Yes, to use the TV out you need to set the TV display in Full Screen Theater mode. I have an ATI card and this can be done in the Catalyst Control Center.

This is a problem with Vista. Vista honors HDCP, so the only way the full screen theater mode works is if your video card is HDCP compliant. My older ATI X850 was not HDCP compliant and when I upgraded from WinXP to Vista 32 the theater mode went away. I replaced my video card with an ATI HD 2400 card, which is HDCP compliant, and the theater mode came back. However, my Vista graphics rating dropped. I use this system for video editing and like to view the result on the TV monitor.

[radius9]

The PlaceShifter/Client ended up being the solution to this. I run the Sage on one monitor (my HDMI output to the TV), and I run the client full screen on the touchscreen, so I end up with 2 instances on the same box. This actually works better than a clone, because I found the video playing on the touchscreen at the same time as the main screen to be fairly distracting (kept seeing movement out of the corner of my eye). I have my remote control setup to control what I see on the TV, and then I can navigate the menus using the touchscreen. The only part that is a little strange is that I can be playing music and I have to turn it off manually (which I forget to do), otherwise it mixes the output from both.