everything works fine, but not through a VGA cable

[nerdlinger1]

mpcstar is working fine on my laptop and all other info on my desktop is being transferred to my tv via a VGA cable but when i click on a movie to play with mpcstar it plays on my laptop but has just a black box on my tv through the vga... what is up? i dont know what i did but im assuming i did something. it wont let me update either, says cant connect to network even if i turn off my firewall

[kluelos]

Turning off a firewall is a spectacularly bad idea.

A firewall prevents incoming nasties from contacting you. Now that you've turned it off, there's nothing to stop them, and you're likely already infected.

(If you had trouble with the lock, would you take your front door off the hinges? Because that's what you did with your computer.)

Televisions operate at much lower resolutions than computer screens. Without any information at all about what sort of equipment is being used here, my best guess is that your television doesn't support the resolution it's being asked to handle inside the MPCStar window.

[nerdlinger1]

i kno the firewall is important and only turned it off for about 10 seconds to see if it would update without it ans it still wouldnt. so i immediately turned it back on. this has been working for me for months and now all of a sudden its not working. i guess i will see if there is something with the resolution i can change but i do have a 1080p tv.

[nerdlinger1]

also to be clear, my desktop and the mpc star box are all being transferred to my tv via the vga cable, but when i hit play on any movie the inside of the box is black and the rest of the info on my computer monitor is still being transferred to the tv, just not the movie im trying to play(but it does play in the box on my computer monitor

[kluelos]

So you're telling us that this used to work, but that you didn't think that was worth mentioning in your original post -- neither did you see fit to mention that this was a high-definition TV?

If it used to work and doesn't now, then you changed something. You need to figure out what you changed, (instead of asking us and without volunteering critically important information).

[The UnUsual Suspect]

See if it plays the video in full screen mode.

[nerdlinger1]

no need to get mad at me... geeze. i wrote that early in the morning after a frustrating night of trying to figure it out on my own and as a last resort turned here for help. but it seems that all other players, windows media player, nero and quicktime all play as they should on my monitor and tv via VGA cable. only mpcstar is having this issue and i dont see anyway to adjust the quality of the image in mpcstar. same thing in full screen or not. sorry i didnt convey all info from the get go but im new to all this

[The UnUsual Suspect]

Don't worry, no one is mad at you. Just keep in mind that our staff volunteer their time to help people, and we deal with members every day that don't tell us even the most basic things that are right in front of them, and sadly, we can't read minds, so it can get frustrating.

As for your problem, I could be wrong about this, but mpcstar's job is to put the video on your screen, which it's doing, and getting your computer to put that onto your secondary video out, then getting your TV to display it seem unrelated to mpcstar. What I'm saying is that if it's playing on your primary video, I think it's job is done, and you must have a problem with either your television or your video adapters settings for your secondary display. Although if other media players will play, then there is something that we are unaware of, but since all we know is what we have read in your posts, we can't really offer much help.

However, let the rest of our staff and members have a look, maybe someone has a suggestion.

[nerdlinger1]

thank you all for your time.

the only thing i have done in the past week was run the uniblue suite to free up memory. i thought maybe it removed something it shouldnt have but the fact that mpcstar is doing what it should do on my laptop monitor is what has got me thinking it didnt. i tried to update and it wouldnt connect, so i removed it and redownloaded 4.5 i believe. but same issue. something was changed but ive looked through all the tabs in mpcstar and cant seem to find somehting thatwill help. so strange and again i very much appreciate anyones time donated or paid. there are alot of us outhere who just get baffled by this stuff.

[The UnUsual Suspect]

I think our staff does a wonderful job, and naturally since all our products are free, there is no source of income to pay support personal, so it's supported by the community.

Any members here are welcome to help, but those who are very helpful, and have the knowledge, expertise and willingness are given staff positions. We consider it our contribution the the community, and a way to fight back against the over priced and often useless commercial software products that attempt to dominate the computer industry.

Regarding your problem, I'd say your probably right, you got something deleted that it needs to send the video to your remote monitor. Check your display adapter in device manager and see if any errors are reported, it could be using a "fall back" setting of a generic driver that windows will do if the display drivers don't work. This is necessary, obviously because if you can't see your screen, you can't do anything at all, but they sometimes don't give you enough of a warning when an error like this occurs.

You might want to install the latest display drivers for your computer too.

Also, when running programs to "clean up" your computer, use some common sense when deleting stuff. Many of them tell you that you have duplicate files because they have the same name, so people delete all but one, but they could all be different, or even if the same, installed software may expect to see them each in their own specific location. The ironic part of this is these files are often so small that there is no benefit in deleting them, but people do it, then blame the software for screwing up their system.

Good luck at tracking this down.

[greywizard]

I guess, it might be a good idea to give the exact specs on your system's OS, mobo, GPU, and on your TV. Perhaps, Lucy will be able to pass this issue to the developing team and get a hint from them.

I may be wrong but this looks very much like an overlay issue, to me. However, since overlay may be affected by a lot of factors (OS, video card type, video drivers, rendering method etc.) it's hard to give an exact answer. You may try to play a bit with the overlay parameters of ffdshow and see if it makes any difference.

Also, does this happen for all types of video (divx, xvid, flash, x264) and all type of containers (.avi, .mkv, .flv etc.) or just for some?

[nerdlinger1]

i have an acer aspire 3690 computer that is running windows vista home premium, T2080 @ 1.73 GHz and 2.00 GB ram, 32 bit. my tv is a apex 42 1080p LCD and is connected via a VGA cable. this "not showing up on my tv" seems to happen with any file i click, but i think i have all AVI files... i checked display drivers and all are working as supposed too and up to date. im not sure how to find the answers to the questions not answered.

[kluelos]

Since Uniblue mucks about with everything, you'll pretty much have to reinstall and reconfigure everything.

Pay most attention to your video, and start with your video settings, which Uniblue probably "helped" you with. It's quite possibly you've got alternate monitor settings that it disabled or set to minimum in order to "speed up" your main laptop display.

You need to be very careful of software like UniBlue. It's preferable to manage these things for yourself, for reasons that you're finding out now.

Next, check the system properties in the control panel. That should be enough for getting on with right now, we'll hope you don't need to reinstall drivers and such.