xv overlay - cinema mode

[Dirk Thierbach]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 05:41:33PM +0100, Wesley S. wrote:
> 2007/3/22, Alex Deucher <alexdeucher at gmail.com>:
> >On 3/22/07, Wesley S. <profox at ubuntu-nl.org> wrote:

>>> Is it possible to use xv overlay to play a movie fullscreen on my
>>> TV, but windowed on my computer? (or even minimized on my
>>> computer)

>> Just set up dualhead and play the video on one head while you work on
>> the other.  That's all the "cinema" mode does I suspect.

> Thanks for your answer, Alex. But unfortunately this is not what I
> am looking for.  It's a workaround, but not a real solution for me.

Why is it a workaround? As long as you get the movie fullscreen on
the TV, and windowed on your computer as you wanted, it shouldn't matter 
how the hardware does it.

> However, I have done some more research and it seems to be that only ATI and
> NVidia cards support this kind of thing. ATI calls it "Theatre Mode" and
> NVidia calls it "Video Mirroring"

All NVidia cards I know of have only one video scaler, which only works
on one head. So I would guess that "Video Mirroring" just means they
use the video blitter to produce two copies of the movie image,
one for each head.

> Last but not least, I have an NVidia (Geforce 3 ti 200) pc, I am not using
> it for TV-out (although it has a TV-out connector) but if someone is able to
> get Theatre Mode (Video Mirroring) to work on it, I might use that computer.

The GF3 Ti 200 has only one head AFAIK, so you won't even get dualhead
to work.

> I am pretty sure that I won't have much chance of finding this functionality
> in linux, because I have already looked everywhere, and I found it nowhere.
> So this is sort of my last try. But hey, if it doesn't work, I'll just keep
> using the dualhead option. It's not as nice as theatre mode, but it's
> workable..

Why is it not as nice? There should be no difference. Or is the problem
that the screen size on your TV is not as you would like it?

> All this stuff brings me to a new question though. How hard would it be to
> do this through software? Wouldn't the computer be able to copy the contents
> of a playing video on screen 1 to screen 2? 

I'd say that's exactly what the computer does, no matter if you call it
"Theatre Mode", "Cinema Mode", or "Video Mirroring" :-)

- Dirk