[MPlayer-users] playing movie on 2 monitors using xinerama

[Diego Biurrun]

Petr Cirman writes:
 > I would like to play my movies on both monitors (to get bigger picture).
 > My first adapter is GeForce2MX and the second one is Riva128. Using 
 > nvidia driver for GeForce and nv driver for Riva.
 > Problem:
 > When using Riva's monitor for playing the movies, I must use driver -vo 
 > x11 to see the picture. Every other possible driver shows black screen 
 > instead of the picture. But this driver doesn't support scaling, so I 
 > cannot use fullscreen of both monitors or that scaling...
 > When I use -vo xv I can of course use scaling but only GeForce's monitor 
 > shows the picture (Riva's one doesn't ...).
 > So the result is that I can see movies only on ONE monitor or on both of 
 > them but without fullscreen or scaling (original size ... strange).
 > Does any solutions exist for this ? (Excluding buying new card(s)).

I played around with xinerama some time ago with a Matrox Mystique and
a G200.  When using -vo x11 I could move the movie from one monitor to
the other.  With -vo xmga (and -vo xv but I'm not sure, my memory is
spotty on this point) I could move the window from one monitor to the
other, but the content would be black when moving from the G200
monitor to the Mystique monitor.  This is because -vo xmga directly
accesses parts of the G200's hardware, so it can only work on that
monitor.  With -vo xv it is probably similar.  If you try to benefit
from low-level access to hardware  and thus speed you lose the
abstraction that X11 and xinerama provide.  Somebody with more
knowledge of the technical details should correct me here, but I
believe you will have to make a tradeoff between speed (-vo xv) and
convenience (-vo x11 and xinerama) here.

Diego