[Solved] Desktop replicated on TV does not show videos

[laplume]

Hello Salix users,
I have an oddity when I connect my salix laptop to the home TV via vga cable. Basically the laptop's screen is replicated on the tv (except the wallpaper which defaults to the standard xfce one) and applications are duly replicated except videos. Each time I try to play a .flv or .mp4 file the application works fine on laptop's screen, whereas the TV replica shows only the player window completely blank. Is there any way to fix this?

Thanks in advance for you support.
Antonio

[gapan]

Can you try disabling the internal monitor and have the TV as the only one?

[laplume]

Hello Gapan,
This would be perfect for me. Shall I run a specific command or is it something I can do from xfce settings manager?
Thanks
Antonio

[gapan]

There is an xfce app for changing the screen settings. It should be somewhere in the settings menu. And in the xfce control panel.

Otherwise you can use xrandr from the command line. We'll come to that if the GUI doesn't work properly (I know sometimes it doesn't).

[laplume]

Hello Gapan,
Tried different screen resolutions but problem still persists. I can use the TV as a second screen if I work with spreadsheets, text editor and image viewer. but no possibility to see display videos using VLC (or any other media payer). On the other hand youtube vides are displayed fine using the browser.
That's quite odd, since it appears to be a matter related to media players exclusively. For me everyday not a big issue but a bit annoying.
Let me know if you may have further advice on this.
Regards,
Antonio

[gapan]

OK, let's try something else. Can you install the mplayer2 package? Then from a command line run:

Code: Select all

mplayer -vo help

this will show you all available video outputs.

Now try some with a video. Like:

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mplayer -vo sdl your_video_file

try at least the sdl, xv and x11 outputs. maybe also the gl ones. Some of them are not actual video outputs, but save the frames as picture files (png, bmp etc). caca is interesting.

[laplume]

Hello Gapan,

You got it!
mplayer x11
and
mplayer gl2

did the trick (especially the latter for a full screen view).
I'll mark the thread as solved.
Thanks again.
Antonio

[gapan]

Good, now you can add a line like this:

Code: Select all

vo=gl2

in your ~/.mplayer/config file. If you don't have one you can create it. This will make it permanent.

If you want an actual GUI, you can use smplayer or gnome-mplayer as a frontend. You'll probably need to set the output in there too though.

I guess vlc has some kind of option somewhere to change the output, but as I'm not using vlc at all, I'm not familiar with it.

[laplume]

Hello Gapan,
Thanks for the tip, I will add it to my mplayer config. file.
Anyway I have discovered I can still launch mplayer via terminal adding the extra options with the command gmplayer. I will keep this in mind just to practice and get more confident with CLI.

Thanks again for your support. The more I use this distro, the more I like it.

Regards,
Antonio