2013-01-03, 00:43
I just got a nice new 50" LED TV and have it connected to my ubuntu box (12.04) via HDMI. My desktop monitor is still using the DVI output of my built-in nVidia card.
Anyway. I fooled around enough with the nVidia settings and finally got a desktop screen showing up on the TV by using something called "TwinView". It seems like this was created for people with two monitors in front of them and I can see how it would work great in that case.
It actually works pretty great for me, too. I can browse the internet, watch video, etc... on my TV or my monitor perfectly.
CUT TO:
Now I want to get fancy and try out a cool media server thingy... I read about XBMC and it looks PERFECT. Really slick. Nice. Ok.... well... not so much. After several hours of pulling my hair out, I have two choices:
1) Only get to see half the video I'm watching because XBMC treats both screens as one screen when it is in fullscreen mode, and no amount of dragging the corners of the display in XBMC's settings will let me view the full screen just on my TV.
2) Settle for watching things in "Windowed" mode, so I have this distracting launch bar on the left side of my TV screen all the time.
There's got to be a way to make this work, I just don't see where it is in the settings.
I did find this post: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=139854
Which seems to be talking about this problem, but *holy shit* that seems like a lot of work/hacking/coding just to get this to display correctly on one screen. I am *not* an expert at configuring Linux...
Anyway. I fooled around enough with the nVidia settings and finally got a desktop screen showing up on the TV by using something called "TwinView". It seems like this was created for people with two monitors in front of them and I can see how it would work great in that case.
It actually works pretty great for me, too. I can browse the internet, watch video, etc... on my TV or my monitor perfectly.
CUT TO:
Now I want to get fancy and try out a cool media server thingy... I read about XBMC and it looks PERFECT. Really slick. Nice. Ok.... well... not so much. After several hours of pulling my hair out, I have two choices:
1) Only get to see half the video I'm watching because XBMC treats both screens as one screen when it is in fullscreen mode, and no amount of dragging the corners of the display in XBMC's settings will let me view the full screen just on my TV.
2) Settle for watching things in "Windowed" mode, so I have this distracting launch bar on the left side of my TV screen all the time.
There's got to be a way to make this work, I just don't see where it is in the settings.
I did find this post: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=139854
Which seems to be talking about this problem, but *holy shit* that seems like a lot of work/hacking/coding just to get this to display correctly on one screen. I am *not* an expert at configuring Linux...