Trouble Playing Movies on TV Setup as Second Monitor - PC Hardware Questions & Answers

Chris writes in with a hardware question
Q. I just purchased an S video cable. I hooked it up and it is working from my computer to my TV. My problem is when i go to my windows media player it comes up on my TV and computer screen, but it will not show the movie on the TV. It does show on the computer like normal but I don’t know what to do to get the movie to play. My question is what do I need to do to be able to get the movie playing on the TV screen?

A. I have seen this happen on LCD projectors where it won’t play on both the computer screen and on the projector at the same time and you have to do one or the other. You can test this if your computer will let you pick your TV as the only display device so that you aren't using both of them at the same time. You may want to try to have your TV be an extension of your desktop rather than a second desktop or vise versa depending on which way you have it. You can also try a different media player. I have got this to work with QuickTime on both screens but it may not play your movie files. You can try a free player like VLC Media Player.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

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