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Watching videos full screen with Dual Monitors

K

Knifey-Spoony

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 29, 2010
51
0
I just bought a new monitor to use as a secondary display with my MBP. I'm trying to watch a video in Firefox on my secondary display, when I try to watch the video in full screen and move back the mouse on my MBP display and click on that display. The video on my secondary display will exit full screen. How do I stop this from happening?
 
Would be interested to know the answer. Know this happens with Flash video (e.g having Firefox in one window, using full screen on youtube Flash) - trying to click things on second monitor mess things up.

One workaround is to maximise the video in one screen, but that doesn't work for Flash/H.264 youtube and other style video content playing from a web page, rather than a downloaded file.
 
It's probably dependent on the video/app. Also, the resolutions of both monitors would have to bee the same I would think.

And, you would get a weird aspect ratio. The movie would have to be extremely wide-screened to watch in both widescreen monitors without it zooming in and degrading the image.

Hopefully someone will chime in with more insight.
 
Video

You didn't say what type of video, Flash or Silverlight. Netflix plays fine fullscreen on my secondary monitor in Safari.
 
QuickTime also plays full screen on my MBP monitor while working on my Dell monitor. MBP monitor is set to secondary while my Dell is set to main monitor..

EDIT... Itunes can do this as well
 
Unfortunately, Flash has this behavior on dual monitor systems. Apparently no one at Adobe has a system with two monitors and cares to fix it.

The flaw is on Windows Flash as well, but there's a hack to fix it there. No hack for the Mac, sadly.
 
jonbravo77 said:
QuickTime also plays full screen on my MBP monitor while working on my Dell monitor. MBP monitor is set to secondary while my Dell is set to main monitor..

EDIT... Itunes can do this as well
Click to expand...

I tried this with iTunes and when I move back to my MBP display and click the display, the video will exit full screen.

Most of the videos I'm trying are videos on megavideo, youtube, and revision3.
 
Hey guys. I found a bit of a tacky workaround for this problem, but it works fine for me. When your in Safari watching flash stuff (not sure about Firefox because i never use it), just ⌘+ to zoom in to your desired size, and fiddle around with it until the video is in the right area. This works most effectively with video sites that have the pop-out function, like BBC iPlayer, megavideo etc.

Generally you don't lose too much res, if any, though it can seem laggier this way, but better than nothing for now! :)
 
I have filed a suggestion to bugs.adobe.com.
I hope to get a response soon, more of you should do the same to get some move on this.

Br /D
 
Movist (download) will play full-screen on one monitor while not being the active application, I use it with dual monitors too. MPlayerX (download) does the same thing but I personally prefer Movist as it has more configurability.
 
Just been googling this to no avail, but have sussed out as close as I think you can get to a solution.

I have two monitors, a desktop TFT and an HDMI HD LCD. The desktop is the primary monitor and the LCD telly I use for all video playback.

Install the Google Chrome browser, open it and drag the active chrome window into the secondary monitor, then select full screen from the view options. Then open any flash based site and the fullscreen option will work normally.

It will still snap out if you try using the keyboard or clicking the mouse, though.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; nb-no) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148a Safari/6533.18.5)

jonbravo77 said:
QuickTime also plays full screen on my MBP monitor while working on my Dell monitor. MBP monitor is set to secondary while my Dell is set to main monitor..

EDIT... Itunes can do this as well
Click to expand...

Err.. Itunes can't do this as the other screen turns black:)
 
so does vlc i have to 1080 monitors one will go black when i use vlc full screened my windows machine does not on its dual monitors with vlc
 
ljonesj said:
so does vlc i have to 1080 monitors one will go black when i use vlc full screened my windows machine does not on its dual monitors with vlc
Click to expand...

There's a setting in the VLC preferences to disable blanking the second monitor.

foxwelljsly said:
It will still snap out if you try using the keyboard or clicking the mouse, though.
Click to expand...

Yes, just like Safari and Firefox. The problem isn't getting the full screen flash on a second monitor, it's still being able to use the second monitor for other tasks.


This flaw in Flash is one reason I watch very few flash videos online.
 
I have the same problem watching to NBA league pass :( The only kind of solution I have found to this, is to play the videos through a Parallels virtual machine, set to full screen on my TV. However, you need a really powerful machine, or you'll have annoying choppy or low quality video. Flash eats up a lot of processor! My newly bought iMac with 3.2GHz and 4 GB RAM hardly does the job.

I've also tried using an old Mac Mini as media center, but Flash doesn't go well with PPC based systems. Again, crappy quality and choppy video.

This is so frustrating... :confused:
 
This works if you use google chrome. Or at least it does for me.

Edit: Sorry, I know this is a little old.
 
As Remixen noted: it does work after the update. No need for any workaround at all! Just used safari and had one flash video (youtube) playing fullscreen on the second monitor while clicking and writing on a text document on the main screen!
 
I think I figured it out.

I just got NBA league pass full screen on my external monitor without mirroring my displays. I changed my resolution on both my monitors to be the same, and it worked immediately. Try it and let me know if it works!
 
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