The VideoLAN Forums

I've been tinkering around with VLC since I want to present a way to improve on a existing system for showing videos in a cinema.

My concept is that I, or some other knowledgeable, would do a simple playlist that would work as a "fire&forget"-solution. This because I want to be sure that the operators would just need to open the playlist, move the output window to the projector and make it full size. I thought that de-embedding it from the player would be ideal for this, since one would have the player-controls on the screen that the audience don't see. It sortof worked.

But some snags have been encountered:

1. No matter how I try, when the playlist changes to the next item, it sends the output-window to a random monitor (I have three on the system I'm testing this concept out on, 2 on a nvida gpu and one on a USB>DVI-device). I don't see any predictable pattern in the choices it makes, it just seems to not want to be in the same window it sat in during the last playlist item. This alone is irritating and kills the concept right off.

2. The old, "when changing playlist items, a brief fraction of a second the desktop underneath is shown, complete with VLC-interface etc." I have read around on the forum and not found out why this is so or how one could work around it. is there a workaround to this tiny lapse of focus that VLC always gets?

3. Is there a way to set up the playlist with pre-set settings like spoken languages, subtitles, custom color correction, cropping, aspect ratio, etc...? Maybe utilizing a system that reads a text-file that accompanies the video-file, filled with vlc-settings. That's just as easy to use as a well prepared .srt-file...? Maybe something for a future version though?

Both computers run windows 7, and I use VLC1.0.5.Goldeneye

1. If you can use DirectX output, it has an option that can select on which desktop the video should be played.
3. .bat file is only method I know, but certain settings don't reset properly between files/streams.

1. I've been trying to get the video to start on a secondary screen. took a while to figure out and finally got it working. Here's how it can be done:
(i'm using Windows 7 and VLC 1.0.5. Choosing DirectX video output (mentioned by VLC_help) disables the Aero effect, don't know why..)

a) Set your secondary screen to be on the right, under, or both on the right and under (diagonal to) the primary screen. If you set it to be on the left or above the primary screen, it will get negative coordinates and the Video coordinate settings won't work in VLC (negative number coordinate means auto adjusting to VLC)

b) Go to Preferences, Show All settings, then Video

c) Tick "Fullscreen video output", and untick "Embedded video"

d) Under "Window properties" section, set both Video width and Video height to be 1 (VLC has a small delay when switching to/from fullscreen automatically [selected in step c], set this to 1 so the audiences won't see the video before/after the video being fullscreened/unfullscreened)

e) Video X/Y coordinates:
i. if you have your secondary screen on the right of the primary one, set X to be the width of your primary screen resolution (eg. 1280), and Y to be 0
ii. if secondary screen is under your primary one, X will be 0 and Y will be the height of the primary screen resolution (eg. 800)
iii. if you have a diagonal screen setup, X will be the width (eg. 1280) and Y will be the height (eg. 800) of primary screen resolution.

f) Untick "Window decoration" (same reason as step d)

g) save the settings and restart VLC

h) move the VLC control and playlist windows to the primary screen, and play your videos. It should be playing on the secondary screen now

2. Workaround could be to make the secondary screen black (have black solid background color). That's what I do too

3. I'm also looking for that feature. And I wish I can specify the start time of each playlist item.

disables the Aero effect, don't know why..

Known limitation of Aero, it doesn't work with DirectX.