So last night my windows media player developed a fascinating bug.
Prior to last night, I could play a movie in one screen and do work in the other. But not anymore.
A Computer Express article from July of 2004 (Try the cached version here) had this to say:
"3. Video playback Windows Media: Windows Media Player automatically detects the availability of a double display configuration. When you play the media clip (videos, DVC, VCD) Media Player automatically plays it in full screen mode on the secondary display. On the primary display, the full UI version of Windows Media plays. This way, you can adjust the video properties, audio graphic equalizer settings on the base display, while full screen video is projected on the secondary screen (typically the projector). "
Peter Provost mentioned this bug back in August of 2003 and he doesn't seem to have gotten an answer for his question, "Does anyone know how to stop this behavior? Ideally it should be something I can control on the fly. It is very annoying when you don't want it, but useful when you do want it"
The worst part is that up until the last day of 2006, my media player worked with out this really nasty feature. And then *poof* January 1st 2007, a 3+ year old bug .... sorry, feature, shows up to haunt me.
Does anyone know of a solution? I would like to be able to alter the configuration of windows media player to either hijack my secondary monitor, or free it up for my use.
Lastly does anyone know someone on the windows media team who might know the answer?
[Edit]
Found it, I don't know who the realtimesoft.com people are, but they pinpointed the solution to an irritating issue.
When playing a video, it is also shown fullscreen on the other monitor
This happens if the video mirroring feature of your video card is enabled. You can disable this option on the tab for your video card under advanced display properties, Nvidia calls this feature Full Screen Video, for ATI video cards it is called theater mode, and Matrox calls it PureVideo/DVDMax.
I went in to my NVidia menu, and there on the GForce 6500 menu (it's an odd little side popout menu) was an entry for "Full Screen Video". In the second section there is a drop down for "Full screen device", some how it had gotten set to "auto select", I put it back to "Disable" and all was right with the world again.