The VideoLAN Forums

Hi everyone. I'm new, so first off, apologies if I'm asking anything obvious or really stupid.
I run VLC (in John Haller's portable version) on a laptop with an external monitor. The display is set up in "clone" mode, i.e. everything that's visible on the built-in screen is mirrored on the larger external screen. The only program that "escapes" this setup is VLC: Whenever a video file is opened, it goes full-screen on the external monitor only. I've searched through all the settings, but couldn't find a way to turn this off. Any hints are appreciated, thank you in advance.

Overlay video output?

Thanks so much - I just had to uncheck "overlay video output". Strange that I didn't figure it out myself, although I spent a lot of time trying out various combinations of checked and unchecked boxes... I don't want to gripe, but the option could probably be called something more easily understandable than "overlay video output".

It is a standard name for that feature. Not something that (drunken) VLC devs came up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay

It is a standard name for that feature. Not something that (drunken) VLC devs came up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay

Fair enough, but standard or no standard, it's not intuitively understandable for anyone who's not into video terminology, and that I would say is the majority of users. Even after reading the Wikipedia article, I still don't understand exactly how this works and how it relates to the problem I had...
I suppose that "video overlay" additionally does other things under the hood that I'm not aware of? However, just in case it doesn't, something like "full-screen video output on external monitor" would be a more friendly wording for us non-geeks.

It affects other things also than your external monitor. And that external monitor mirroring depends about your display adapter control panel settings (theater mode in ATI and full screen video mirroring in NVIDIA).

Just wanted to say that after hours of struggling to get my VLC to show videos in my TV connected to my monitor I found the answer I needed in this thread - thanks very much. Should attach it to every download of wonderful VLC.

It affects other things also than your external monitor. And that external monitor mirroring depends about your display adapter control panel settings (theater mode in ATI and full screen video mirroring in NVIDIA).

OK, thanks again for your help. I still don't understand what's going on, though - it's not important anymore, because now everything works like I want it to. Just to sort out any misunderstanding there may have been - ATI is set to clone mode, which works just fine with everything except VLC (before I changed the setting you showed me, that is).

If this "overlay" setting can't be named something else for whatever reasons, it might be a good idea to add some warning to it - like "activates full-screen output on external screen, overriding clone mode" or something similar. This would help non-geek users that want to turn external full-screen output either on (like the commenter above) or off (like me). Just my 2 cents.