ATI 7500 or 9000 - issues with video on LCD and external s..

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops,microsoft.public.powerpoint (More info?)

Steve wrote:
> Has anyone had any experience with attempting to play a video in a
> window on the laptop's LCD screen and an external device at the same
> time, with the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 or 9000? I am finding that
> one screen shows the video in it's window, and the other screen shows
> the window with BLACK in it.
>
> I am using P4 laptops with tons of regular RAM. Also, both of these
> cards use at least 32MB of RAM, so I should expect that there's
> enough of THAT to make it happen.
>
> On another machine with a ATI 9000 I am seeing another problem: The
> LCD screen plays the video in it's window, and the external device
> plays it full screen. If I switch the primary monitor to the
> external, it's the other way around. Again, I want the two screens
> to mirror 100%.
>
> Thanks much,
> Steve

It's unfortunate that neither ATI or the vendors adequately document the
capabilities of these OEM laptop adapters, IMO. The ATI adapters
identify a video stream and depending on how the adapter has been
specifically OEM-configured, and what options are available in the
adapter properties, the cards do just what they are going to do, making
it unlikely that they can be forced to do anything else that the user
wants to accomplish, even if that capability might exist.

As a very simple example, I was surprised to find that there was no
gamma adjustment in my ATI 9000 Mobility 64MB adapter. I installed the
newest Catalyst with the Dhmodtool1.7 and found that gamma was still not
available. Sony issued an updated driver, I installed it and now there
is a gamma adjustment. Capabilities exist in these adapters that
cannot be accessed if the OEM vendor chooses not to make that capability
available. So, if you can't find a way to change the performance of the
adapter through the adapter properties or modding an ATI driver, it is
very likely that the change simply cannot be made.

Q

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops,microsoft.public.powerpoint (More info?)

Steve wrote:
> Has anyone had any experience with attempting to play a video in a window
> on the laptop's LCD screen and an external device at the same time, with the
> ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 or 9000? I am finding that one screen shows the
> video in it's window, and the other screen shows the window with BLACK in
> it.

I have not had this problem.

I've used a PowerPro laptop sold by PowerNotebooks.com with an ATI Mobility
Radeon 9000, Pentium M, and 1GB RAM. The external display works perfectly
and reliably. The Fedora Core 1 GNU/Linux system works perfectly with this
machine right out of the box (so to speak), no proprietary drivers needed.
Even high-speed OpenGL rendering works right away. Playing DVDs also works
(on this OS some additional software is needed to do this, but all decoding
and decryption is done in software and yet one can do full-screen display
and watch the movie without slowdown or stuttering. At any time I can plug
in an external display and see everything I see on the laptop's LCD, no
problem.