Projector Issues When Connected To Laptop

[gangstarr]

I've just bought a projector which is connected to my laptop by a vga cable.

The desktop of the laptop shows up on the projection and seems to work fine ie I can for example see this web page i am on right now writing this. However whenever I try and watch a video file it either just comes up as a black window (in vlc) where the video is on the laptop or it just crashes the program (in the case of trying to watch files in windows media player or quicktime.)

As VLC is my main app for vids i'd prefer to get this working but if it is possible to get any program to work I could live with that.

I can watch videos on the likes of alluc.org and youtube but again on certain websites I just get a black box where the video is showing up on the laptop.

I know this is probably just due to some really obvious setting that I haven't checked but any help would be greatly appreciated

[IneptVagrant]

Make sure the "projector" is set to the "primary display"

On some laptops this will require, disabling all other displays including the laptop's screen -- then you can try to renable it, so its not he primary.

[Psycho Ced]

hmm ... Drivers maybe?

[Aaron.Walkhouse]

Try Settings/Video/Overlay video output off

[gangstarr]

cheers guys.

tinkering around with the display settings in avi catalyst sorted it out

thanks again

[Aaron.Walkhouse]

ATI Catalyst, presumably, and you probably selected Clone mode.

If you had mentioned it was an ATI card we could have told you how right away.

[gangstarr]

Wierdly today it stopped working at all. Before I would detect ththen swap displays then maintain the per display mode settings and bingo it would work. I also seem to remember that even if the projector was just hooked up to the vga port of the laptop i'd see the desktop - just was having the issues I first posted about.

However now when I hook it up to my laptop it just says vga no sync. When I swap the displays it the projector screen flashes (too quick to see anything it just goes black for like half a second) and then it goes ba ck to saying vga no sync. I've checked the vga cable and it is definately plugged in securely.

Also in ati catalyst it now tells me that it can not load my preferred settings when I try to swap displays - ie it can't achieve teh setting needed to run the projector. As ATI catalyst still recognises that the projector is there I don't think its my laptop. (I also hooked it up to another laptop just to see if the desktop would show up - wasn't worried bout messing with displays to get video but again it says no vga sync.) Is my projector bust already?Is there a way of sorting a dodgy vga connection?

Does anyone have any tips for sorting this out? I don't mind if it doesn't involve using ati catalyst - I was only using that cause it was already on my computer.

I'd be so greatful if any of you could help me out,

Merry Christmas guys

[Aaron.Walkhouse]

The most reliable way is to disable Theater Mode, use Clone mode and set the resolution to
the best one for the Projector. You may have to disable overlay mode in VLC too, which will
sidestep a lot of codec complications for the sake of compatibility.