Anyone know how to make WinDVD always open on my second display? I grabbed ATI's Hydravision thinking it would do it, but for some reason, the WinDVD process never appears as an option in the list box of applications to configure. I thought Ultramon would do this also, but I could not figure out how for the life of me. With as many HTPC's as there are these days, I'm surprised they don't have support for defining a default display device in the configuration options ...

Did you try ultramon. I can't remeber if it did that or not.

Yet another reason I love mplayer. Two of my seven quicklaunch icons are mplayer shortcuts.

I simply drag a video file on the left one to open it in a normal window. I drag it onto the right one to open the file in full screen on the second monitor.

I know it's not what you're looking for, but it's possible to use it for your situation.

WARNING -- Attempted Thread Hijacking -- Pardon the intrusion.

I have a new laptop that I haven't sullied with too many players/codecs yet, so I'm thinking I'll switch to MPlayer. From the website it sounds like the be all and end all -- QT/MPEG, Real, VfW/WMV in all their many versions. Are there any "gotchas," or just grab a fistfull of codecs and go?

Appologies for continued hijacking

Yes, that should be all you have to do. Simply decompress the codecs you like into the appropriate subfolder (I believe its....codecs), and you should be able to play nearly any file. I don't remember the last file I threw at it that it couldn't play. It couldn't play some of the odd ones I've converted, but that's just because I made them poorly.

So yeah, all those formats are playable, as well as VOB files, so I play all my DVDs with it too, since PowerDVD can be a hog. Sadly, I haven't figured out how to get mplayer to be my program of choice for online Quicktime files, but it works for streaming those sometimes. It's just those ones that are embedded in the page that won't do it.

Anyway, welcome! I hope it works well for you too.

*edit*
Oh, and the place I go for the quick and dirty Windows installer is here. Just get the "WinMPlayer Installer - The Movie Player for Win32 1.0pre5 (3.77MB)". I don't think you should need that Real Media 9 codec pack.

I just had a go at Mplayer... Very nice little program. Its ability to let me spec the precise aspect ratio and cropping of the movie file is very useful. I tried it when I ran into some frustration moments with both Quicktime and Windows Media Player, when I wanted to zoom in on a letterboxed video file (to remove the black bars on my 16:9 TV) and couldn't do so. A quick scan through the Mplayer command-line parameters and now I've got an icon onto which I can drag MPG files and it crops/zooms to the precise aspect ratio I want. Sweet.