Foo - Movies not displaying, but everything else is?

So I am trying to project a video from a laptop to my television. I got an S video cable that goes from laptop to TV, all seemed to be okay. Everything I do on the laptop is being displayed on the television until...
I try to use windows media to play a movie. THe movie is playing and being displayed on the laptop. However on TV, the onlu thing I see is the normal windows media interface. Where a movie would typically be displayed, it is simply black.
I tried it with another movie playing application besides windows media, same thing. Just black screen where movie would be. But I can go online, click the start menu, do whatever, and it displays right on the TV okay.

Can anybody tell me why this is?

Try going to your control panel, double click on display, then
open the settings tab.
You should see a listing of monitors hooked to your laptop. See if you
can make your external monitor your main or equal display for the laptop.
good luck!

So I am trying to project a video from a laptop to my television. I got an S video cable that goes from laptop to TV, all seemed to be okay. Everything I do on the laptop is being displayed on the television until...
I try to use windows media to play a movie. THe movie is playing and being displayed on the laptop. However on TV, the onlu thing I see is the normal windows media interface. Where a movie would typically be displayed, it is simply black....

Can anybody tell me why this is?So you're saying that EVERYTHING UP TO the movie-players work OK? Like you can see the desktop & icons and windows and stuff just fine? Most likely your movie-players are using DirectX overlays that bypasses the frame-buffer used for the S-video outputs. To disable the overlays, go to ControlPanels -> Displays -> Settings -> Advanced -> Troubleshooting.

In the HardwareAcceleration, turn it down one click at a time towards the NONE end. Hit Apply, and start up the movie-player. If no display still, turn down it another click. Depending upon the video hardware, sometimes you need to turn it all the way down to NONE for the S-video outputs to work. :)

Hmmm...I've seen this before, but I can't think what the problem actually was. I think when I switched from using the S-video input to using a regular RGB monitor cable the problem went away, but that wasn't the root cause of it.