ATi dual monitor question

[ThreeOnTheTree]

I have a Mobility Radeon 9000, and have hooked up my 15" LCD to the CRT port to my laptop. The dual display feature works just fine, as both screens light up and function as intended. My scheme was to put both 15" monitors side by side and get a wide-screen DVD player out of the setup. Here's the trick, my DVD player (be it power DVD or WMP) will stretch across both screens, but only one monitor will show the movie (effectively showing just half of the movie). The funny thing is, whichever monitor has the bigger half of the player proggie holds the video, while the other half is just blank. Is there a way to fix this to get both monitors to coodinate the picture? I guess this is a hard thing for a GPU to do, but I gotta try. I could have it where there is only a half inch line between the 2 monitors, so it could make a great wide screen in theory.

Anyone else try this or have any ideas?

[wetling]

I don't think so, but good luck.

[MuFu]

Yep, good luck. It's impossible with the 9000, as far as I know.

Stick a piece of black tape down the middle of your TV and then decide whether you want to waste time and effort trying to get this working.

MuFu.

[ThreeOnTheTree]

hehe, I just want to try it to see if it works. In theory it could be a decent screen, but I guess alot of actors would get cut in half.

So you say it's not likely with a 9000, so what card might do it? A fireGL? Matrox? I would think it has something to do with directplay, but it just seems odd that the card can split every 2d image except movies. Thanks for the ideas, anyway.

[MuFu]

It's because the card can handle only one hardware video overlay, which it can't manage across more than one output.

There are cards that can handle multiple overlays, but you're likely to find them only in Sun workstations etc. You could always use two graphics cards, but I think the feature would still need to be supported by the player application. Not entirely sure to be honest... perhaps there is "video wall" software that can do a something like this.

MuFu.