It took me about 30 minutes of fiddling to get this to work.

You should see the top left hand corner of your desktop, truncated to 800x600 or so when you turn on the projector. Don't bother trying to get this to go full screen. It's not going to happen.

What you have to do is
  1. go into VLC media player,
  2. click settings > preferences
  3. check off "advanced options"
  4. Under Video, Expand Output modules
  5. Select OpenGL.
  6. Change "screen for fullscreen" to 1.

Save your settings and it should work.