I would suggest trying Media Player Classic, which is a
free download.
> As Jack says, you're probably dealing with a protection issue.
What format
> are the videos? Are they DVDs, mpgs, ...? Are they
commercially made or ones
> that you made yourself? Are the ones that work
a different format than the
> ones that don't? What players have you tried
other than Windows Media
> Player?
Thanks to all for the
questions. Some answers and additonal details...
I have two videos,
one .avi and one .wmv, that appear just fine on both monitors using Windows
Media Player (WMP) under XP SP2. Then I have other .avi files that show up
on one monitor, but not the other. WMP shows up on both monitors, but the
window playing the video is blank on one monitor but not the other. These
are not DVDs. The videos that do not work are ones that we made ourselves,
while the videos that do work are ones that came with Windows. Both videos
that work and videos that do not are .avi format. We have also tried VLC
media player with the same results.
My latest theory is that HDCP is
messing us up. Perhaps HDCP content gets sent to the digital outputs of
the DVI, but not the analog (VGA) outputs, which is all that goes out through
the DVI-to-VGA adapter. I did not know that HDCP could block only a part
of the video screen (i.e., only the part of the screen containing protected
content), I would like to have that confirmed. I also do not know why
videos that we made ourselves would be burdened with HDCP, while other videos
from Microsoft are not. I would like to know how to encode our own videos
in order to avoid problems with HDCP.
I suspect we could fix this by
replacing the dual DVI card with a dual VGA card, or with an adapter that
converts the digital DVI outputs to VGA.
-- dkm
