x31 video weirdness

[richarddd]

I decided to hook my old x31 up to an external monitor to use as a video player.

If I have both the LCD and the external monitor on and try to play a movie, the monitor shows everything other than the actual movie. It shows the desktop, the movie player, etc., but the rectangle in the movie player that should show the movie is black. Everything looks normal on the LCD.

If I turn the LCD off, the movie plays fine on the external monitor.

If I'm playing a video, I can't switch between LCD, monitor and both. If I close the video player, then I can switch.

I've tried the windows media player, VLC and media player classic home cinema.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, as this makes no sense at all to me.

[automobus]

You are definitely experiencing a problem of video acceleration. Accelerated video rendering is apparently only supported on the primary display (laptop panel). Just a total guess here, no idea if it will help:
In VideoLAN, open preferences and display all. Under Inputs / Codecs > Video codecs > FFmpeg > Decoding, try disabling Direct rendering.
Again, this is just a guess. It might help, make things worse, or have no effect.

[richarddd]

I'll play with that, which might take a few days.

Happy holidays!

[richarddd]

Updating the video driver seemed to have done the trick.

Now that it works, I can connect my VGA to s-video device and play videos on an older TV.