Video playback @ 1920 x 1200 (16:10) resolution

[cmuxed]

Sup peeps,

I have a HP 2140 Netbook running Karmic / 9.10 Ubuntu @ 1920 x 1200 (16:10), very smoothly might I add. However... when I attempt to play a video file, it will play only the sound and leave a blank screen; regardless of the application (Banshee, avidemux, vlc, etc) or video file type (mpeg4, avi, etc). If I lower the resolution to say; 1024 x 768 (4:3), then the video will appear. In case you are wondering, I do have a 26" ASUS LCD connected in extended (not mirrored) mode via a Belkin KVM.

The graphics card details:

lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)

Does anyone have any ideas how I can get this silly thing to stop annoying me? Even though this is not a machine I sit and regularly watch videos at, I would rather not change the resolution just to watch a clip or test a rip etc.

Any ideas? All the threads and relentless searching seems to keep refering me to dudes who have problems changing resolutions. I can change the reso, its just my card does not seem to want to play movies at 1920 x 1200!

Cheers!

[cmuxed]

Although it is not a solution, I have installed resapplet to speed up resolution changes. It adds a little icon on the top panel.

apt-get install resapplet

[efflandt]

Have you tried turning your netbook display off with xrandr before trying to display video on the external display? But you would probably need to set mirrored mode or the external display as primary before doing that.

For my laptop with older Intel 945 video, I just boot up, BIOS and grub use the external display and then gui login comes up on both displays (in matching 1024x768). Then I select one of two desktop launchers from X that uses xrandr commands in a script to switch to resolution of the external display (1360x765 or 1920x1080 which makes background image on laptop display very large) and the script switches off my laptop display (xrandr --output LVDS1 --off).

[cmuxed]

(xrandr --output LVDS1 --off).

Thanks efflandt, I have been mucking around with xrandr and by switching off my extended mode (i.e. the netbook display LVDS1), the video does appear, however when I switch it back to extended mode, the video blanks out again. I'll keep playing with it and see what I can do.

What I have tried so far:

sudo xrandr --output LVDS1 --off  < as expected, netbook screen is disconnected
sudo xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto < massive mirrored display on netbook
sudo xrandr --output LVDS1 --left-of VGA1 < back to reality (1024x576)

I'll post my result soon!

[cmuxed]

After re-reading my posts, I thought I had better be more literal with the reason for me posting this topic.

I want to have at the same time in extended mode, my netbook running at 1024 x 768 and my external vga lcd running at 1920 x 1200 and be able to play videos ...without the video output being blank, of course!

[cmuxed]

Ok so dj-weird is in the house: I was mucking around with the xrandr commands and used the --output -above VGA1 option and the video continued to work. I then commanded it back to left-of and it disappeared again!