T40 w/ Projector, Video displays as black box

[sswany]

Using a T40 with a projector on VGA, when shown, any video through WinDVD (and others I believe) is showing as a black box. There is sound and the rest of windows is shown, but no video.

It's using Presentation Director for settings, etc. and whatever the newest IBM driver is.

ANy ideas?

[Marc_G]

This is a common problem. You need to set the external display as the primary display in the Display Properties. Usually Settings... Advanced... Displays. Choose the external as primary.

[thinklad]

The black box instead of video is because your video application is using overlays to display the video. The external video will not include the overlay.

Sometimes the options of the video software allow you to disable use of overlays. However, overlays is a more efficient way of displaying video.

I connected my T30 to my TV using s-video to test out the quality. At first I had the same black box when playing files with windows media player. After finding the setting for not using overlays, it displayed on the secondary monitor (TV). However, the quality was reduced and there was a noticable amount of 'video tearing'.

Here is the setting in windows media player:

Screen grab of the setting screen

Under "video acceleration" click on advanced.

This way you don't have to change your primary monitor settings.

Cheers,
Dave