Automatically start MP fullscreen on secondary display (1 Viewer)

[TNDAri]

Normaly WinXP managed all the second screen stuff for you.

Just make a shortcut to mp on your second screen, start it. Just close MP and restart.....windows will open it on the second screen again....normaly

Every other application do this with this trick.....maybe mp too????

 

[Lolita]

No because it have set dispaly 1 in DIRECTX render, it is not standard windows aplication so don't have standard behavior ... i switched to meedio becasuse of it and im quite happy now (i managed to send keys from my remote wonder 1 to medio ONLY so i can control meedio and rest of computer separetly).

 

[HappyTalk]

Yer I couldn't get this app working properly, didn't like command line to d:\program files... where my MP is. Like guy above I realised I could make it open full screen on second monitor merely by placing a shortcut on the second screen.

However I have found that running in any mode other than single display mode on nvidia cards has a negative effect on the video, be it dual display or clone so run in single display and flick between tv/projector.

I've yet to work our how best to achieve good quality video. NVidia cards/drivers are a law unto themselves. I managed to get it running in 1280x768 on widescreen tv using latest (official) 91.31 nvidia drivers via svideo after a bit of fiddling (without it using daft 800x600 window viewport that is). However I find the video a bit ghostlike + the widescreen skins though working fine are a bit too small on 28" Widescreen CRT TV to clearly see what's going on.

 

[dhannema]

Yer I couldn't get this app working properly, didn't like command line to d:\program files... where my MP is.

This also doesn't work when specifying double quotes around the argument?

E.g. like this:

mp_start "D:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\MediaPortal.exe"

 

[HappyTalk]

I tried it with quotes yer, but as I said it can be done by simply putting the icon on second screen. I've found when using nvidia dual display modes, video smoothness seem to suffer so have abandoned using them anyway.

 

[dhannema]

I tried it with quotes yer, but as I said it can be done by simply putting the icon on second screen. I've found when using nvidia dual display modes, video smoothness seem to suffer so have abandoned using them anyway.

Putting the icon on the second screen indeed makes it run on the second screen, but this still doesn't set your second screen as the primary device !
This will cause your video smoothness to deteriorate !!!

mp_start also automatically opens your device settings and changes the display to your secondary device.

 

[toddbailey]

Just mentioning the same as in many other posts: Only primary screen is supported in MP due to lack of DirectX acceleration on secondary screen. So your CPU has to do all the rendering usually your graphics card does. The result is a very high CPU usage. MediaPortal is not the only application suffering from this, by the way. Google around a bit if you want to see that some other HTPC apps that also use the way like MP renders GUI and video also behave exactly the same.

The tool in this thread can't help there, it just moves MP to the secondary screen and can lead to some unwanted and unexpected behaviour. Thus it is not officially supported.

I don't believe this, I currently use Meedio which also used direct X and I display on a secondary screen and I see no change in cpu utilization.

 

[toddbailey]

Just to confirm this, I ran a test where I view the same video stream once on the primary display again on the secondary display, in both cases cpu utilization remained fairly constant at 22% with brief spikes to 29 %.

To pass blame on to the dotnet api then later directx is a wrong, I think it's a design issue that needs to be addressed.

 

[HappyTalk]

Putting the icon on the second screen indeed makes it run on the second screen, but this still doesn't set your second screen as the primary device !
This will cause your video smoothness to deteriorate !!!

mp_start also automatically opens your device settings and changes the display to your secondary device.

OK, I see.

Well I ended up setting up profiles in nvidia profile manager one setup for TV, one for Monitor. I assigned hot keys TV=Alt+F11, Monitor=Alt+F12 so can flick between them pretty easily (colour/brightness/contrast set diff for each profile too using THX optimiser). I'm 'sure' I noticed an inferior image when running video on primary monitor in dual view mode vs primary monitor in single view, though there were other unknowns going on at the time that might have skewed that result.

I think I need to be running this on a totally clean install of XP, my current XP has been tweaked to f*** with zillionz of softwares on it. But I have a few machines to play with so will dedicate one when I get time, then I can do proper tests. I currently find MP very slow and cpu hungry at various times for no reason. I've started playing with the code too, looks like fun!

 

[toddbailey]

I have to agree, MP has some performance issues and other issues
The setup wizards for example, max out the cpu for a very long time,
but you have to remember this is not even a product you could consider at a beta level. BUt it's getting there. Back to the dual screen issue, The dev team need to understand why this feature is so important, regardless of how is have to be implimented.