QuickTime - Watching movies on external display

[Andre]

Hi!

There must be a good 200 messages here about attaching external displays to MBPs. I got mine set up and working, but I don't understand how QuickTime's full screen option works.

No matter where my menu bar is (on the MBP or on the external display), clicking full screen always displays my movie on the MBP's screen...? This seems like the opposite of what you would want.

Mirroring the displays is even worse, since the movie plays on both screens. How do I black out my MBP screen and get the fullscreen movie on my external display? I could, I guess, mirror the displays and then turn the brightness of my MBP display to zero, but this seems like a hack. What would be awesome is if the MBP screen could stay on, showing my e-mail and Adium windows, and have the external display show the movie...

Suggestions?
Thanks!

 

[Kash]

I know what you mean, Quicktime doesn't work well with a dual monitor setup. I'm sure there's a way to fix it, but it's really not worth the trouble. Just download VLC and it'll do everything you're looking for

 

[walkerj]

For watching movies in full screen I use QTAmateur, which is a quicktime replacement that is small, light, and does full screen video in an external display quite nicely. I have it on my Dock and drag the movie file down to it. It launches with the movie at the beginning, but a quick Shift+Command+F it will go to full screen on the external and start playing the movie.

Oh, and yes it is free.

 

[Andre]

Oh nice! VLC does what I want, but QTAmateur even allows the MBP screen to be active at the same time! Wow! Someone read mw mind.

Thanks to both of you!

 

[Kash]

VLC allows you to use your main screen as well. I used to do it all the time when I had an external monitor hooked up to my Macbook.

 

[ViriiGuy]

I second the VLC. It is small, fast and FREE!!!!
This is one of the best media players I have ever used. I have it on every single OS I run and it works perfectly on them all. Not once have I come across a file type or codec it could not run, out of the box.

 

[Andre]

VLC allows you to use your main screen as well. I used to do it all the time when I had an external monitor hooked up to my Macbook.

Yes, but it blacks out the notebook screen, right? Is there a way so that your notebook screen stays on, but displays the video full screen on the external monitor? QTAmateur does this, which makes me very happy

 

[Kash]

Like I said, my Macbook's main screen was perfectly usable while VLC did its thing on the second screen.

 

[Andre]

Hmm... I re-read your post and noticed you had mentioned that. I tried with the default settings and it didn't happen, so I switched to that QT app. Sorry!

On another note, what about iTunes movies/videos? This seems to have the same problem as the QuickTime issues in the original post. Is there a way to get around this in iTunes, or can where can I find my iTunes video downloads to play in VLC?

Thanks!