Trouble with full screen on second monitor with Snow Leopard

[dannyr7]

Hey guys,

Upgraded my MacBook 2Ghz to Snow Leopard and having problems displaying HD files full screen on my second monitor (TV), the resolution of which is 1920 x 1200.

Now I know my macbook only has the intel shared memory graphics piece of s*** HOWEVER on regular Leopard, VLC would play HD .mkv files quite happily in full screen on the 2nd monitor. Now its really stuttery - as I say these are the same files that were fine a week ago before the upgrade. When not in full screen, the files play smoothly.

If I turn down the resolution of my second monitor (to 1280 x 800), VLC copes just fine in full screen again, but I don't want to sacrifice the resolution of an expensive monitor just for this - everything else, software wise, works happily in full 1920 x 1200 resolution.

Any ideas?! I thought Snow Leopard was designed to improve performance on lower spec machines?

Thanks for an awsome video player anyway guys - no doubt this is 99% Apple's cock up!

[walati]

I have a MacBook C2D with 2,16GHz and Snow Leopard installed since 1 1/2 weeks.
I always used 1280x720 with Tiger and Leopard on my Panasonic 37'' FullHD-LCD, so the macbook don't need to upscale the 720p video to 1080p for the TV.
1080p mkv-files don't play properly on my MacBook, so i don't need 1920x1080 (1080p).
I think 1080p resolution only makes sence when 1080p videos are played.

Since Snow Leopard i use 1344x756 with Overscan turned on, because the screen fits better than with the 720p profile.

[ajmas]

What is your CPU usage showing when you are playing at 1920 x 1200 on the second screen? Also, is the other screen showing the desktop or blank?

[ycjhi]

I have the same problem. Please note that this problem doesn't happen for me when I play movies on the 1280x800 MacBook LCD. It happens when I watch movies (regardless of the codec and resolution) on my 42" 1080p HDTV as the second monitor. It is fine if I watch movies in the window mode; but, I have the same problem as dannyr7 reported if I play the movies in the full-screen mode. I tested QuickTimeX with the movie files encoded in H264 among the same test set, and it worked just fine. I think maybe I need to try Perian.

FYI, I clean installed Snow Leopard three days ago, and tested both 32-bit and 64-bit builds of VLC 1.0.2. MacBook 2.0Ghz, 2GB RAM, 320GB Momentus7200.3 HDD.