laptop VGA output no video

**jahisthebalance** · July 24th, 2008

I am using the VGA output on the back of my laptop with a ATI radeon 9500 mobility video card. The output works fine for general display of what's on the screen and outputs everything properly to my flat screen TV. Flash videos show up just fine, but when I play an .avi or an .mpeg I get no video and just sound. I've tried playing the video in totem, vlc, and mplayer.

Is there anything special that I need to do for this to work? or is it just something that is not going to happen?

**jahisthebalance** · July 24th, 2008

nothing?

**jamesrfla** · July 24th, 2008

Maybe providing the laptop model might help. Also there is normally more people hear during the weekend to help you with your problem.

**jahisthebalance** · July 24th, 2008

sorry about that, it's a dell inspiron 600m. the TV is a sony. I've done some reading and it seems to me that it is all some sort of DRM thing, but I don't want to sound too paranoid.

**markbuntu** · July 24th, 2008

Do these things work on your laptop screen or is this just a general lack of playback?

**jamesrfla** · July 25th, 2008

Good luck getting it working. We had a Dell laptop and we were trying to get the S-Video TV output to work and we had no luck.

**jahisthebalance** · July 27th, 2008

everything works on the laptop just fine, I have a working desktop on the tv... or that is to say that everything that shows up on my laptop screen is duplicated lovingly onto the larger LCD TV, but when I go up to play a video it shows up fine on the laptop, but not on the LCD TV which is a Sony Bravia. The video card I have is ATI 64 mb-- soldered to the motherboard and doesn't even have a proprietary driver that I can get for it through ENVY NG... so there's that too. I think it's all got something to do with the resolution of the video vis a vis the display resolution of the LCD as it's all related to some DRM thing...

It is strange that if I hook my desktop computer up to the TV videos_will_play and the desktop uses generic drivers as well. So it's all very confusing to me! if anyone knows of a workaround or program/plug-in that could work that would be really great as I'm having to stream videos through a PS3 in order for them to show up from lap-top, and this has problems due to that particular devices "pickiness."