Which players have a software theater mode?

[MfA]

Any players which can put the UI on one display but automatically put the movie on the other display? Like the theater mode from ATI/NVIDIA drivers but without the headaches of the limited renderers&subs support (especially on Vista).

[dat720]

As far as i know that is a Driver feature, not something that can be easily done via software, as the drivers are taking the overlay away from the player window and placing it in the 2nd Display.

[avih]

You can do it on a PC with any NVIDIA card, At least on Windows XP. Just set the driver (from the NVIDIA control panel) to display full video on "other" display.

Don't know about ATI/other cards, and don't know if that will work in Vista.

[MfA]

I have an ATI card. Theater mode only works for me with the overlay renderer under Vista, which is incompatible with Aero (switches off Aero and flashes the screen before overlay playback starts). Also I can't let MPC render the the subs or they won't show up on the second monitor, have to force ffdshow to do it. That's why I was hoping there was a player which simply opened a second window for the video on a specific display, leaving the GUI on the main monitor.

VLC has some settings, but I've never been able to get them to work (also till 0.90 with libass support it's only marginally useful to me). SMplayer is the same thing. Also for both of them the display settings only work with the directx renderer ... which also seem incompatible with Aero.

PS. hmm, zoomplayer seems to be able to do it ... guess I'll stick with that for now.

[dat720]

With mplayer you need to select the Open GL Renderer for Aero....

Goto Options the Preferences and change the Video output Driver to gl:yuv=3, this will solve the vista aero bug.

[MfA]

Yes, but the GL renderer doesn't support the -adapter option ... which is what I need to automatically open it on my second monitor.

[dat720]

Then your 2 options are live without aero, or go back to XP, Overlay > External Display is never going to work as Overlay is a function of Direct Draw, and unless the mplayer dev's can get it working with Vista which probably won't happen as the dev's build for Linux and port to other platforms....

[MfA]

Actually, it seems the xineramascreen command line option is not X11 only like it says in the man page ... when I use smplayer with the option set to open mplayer in it's own window using the command line option "−xineramascreen 2" it usually works right. Although sometimes it fails to open the video in full screen mode.

[Reimar]

Actually, it seems the xineramascreen command line option is not X11 only like it says in the man page ...

It doesn't say that since July 24th, so your man page is outdated :p (though it was wrong for a long time admittedly)

Although sometimes it fails to open the video in full screen mode.

If you ever find a way to reproduce it reliably I will have a look at it (otherwise I fear I'll be too lazy to boot Windows, not to mention debugging that kind of thing with only one monitor available...).

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Yes, but the GL renderer doesn't support the -adapter option ... which is what I need to automatically open it on my second monitor.

Use "gl:force-pbo:ati-hack" as renderer for MPlayer and check "Run MPlayer in its own window" in SMPlayer options :)

Now you can move the MPlayer window over to your second monitor and make it fullscreen using the F button...

[MfA]

The xineramascreen command line option automates that, but as I said ... I got it working mostly (and I don't seem to need the ati-hack option).