Purple box where movie should be using TV-Out

[.Cask]

I had TV-Out working great on my Asus Ti4400. Everything was working fine, until I just tried to play a movie today.

The movie plays fine on my monitor, no problems at all, and the TV-Out was also working fine until I started the movie. Then all I see on the TV is a big purple box where the movie should be. Everything around it is printed as normal, windows media player, the taskbar etc. but with just a big purple box in the middle.

I don't want to go back to playing movies on my monitor. The only thing that I've changed since the last time I worked fine was upgrading the to the new Detonator drivers. I'm not gonna panic and remove them immediately, as they may have deleted some settings that affected the playback of movies... and in that case removing them probably wouldn't fix the problem. But I will try that later.

I just find it bizarre that everything shows up on the TV except for the square where the movie should be playing. I just assumed that the TV-Out port was like an aerial, didn't realise it could be choosy about what it sends or not.

Don't expect anyones had this prob before but always worth a try.

 

[.Cask]

Just reinstalled the old Asus drivers I was using and no change. Still get the purple box. Can't think of anything else that I've changed so I'm a bit stuck for what to do now.

 

[.Cask]

Well I've been fiddling and somehow the problem appears to be player related.

WMP (old version not that beta crap) gives the purple box as I've described above.

Asus DVD Player gives the purple box.

Quicktime gives a black box.

VirtualDub shows the movie playing properly (just a shame it has no fullscreen option!).

The above refers to the TV picture, the monitor picture showed the movie fine on all.

These effects are returned from playing all sorts of movies: mpeg, mpeg2, dvd, vcd, svcd - played from hard disk or from the cd drive.

Need Sherlock Homes for this mystery cos it has totally stumped me.

 

[kameleon]

a: is yor tv on the right channel?
b: have you set in display properties to play on a tv?

 

[.Cask]

Yeah yeah, all that stuff is fine because the TV-Out works fine except it just displays a purple square where the movie should be playing. It displays everything else alright.

Here are some pics to show... (sorry if they're big, cba to edit them).

This is how it looks on my monitor...

And this is the same screen on my TV...

2nd picture isn't too clear but you can see everything else displaying and a purple box where those beatiful film stars should be.

 

[.Cask]

Ahh ok think I've sorted it.

In case anybody else has the same prob - it has something to do with Macrovision (why it chose to strike now I have no idea).

Easiest way to fix it is make the TV Primary display and have monitor as secondary. I expect there are permanent fixes too, I'll check those out later as I have a backlog of movies to watch

 

[tris-]

yeh its to 'try' stop you copying films, i think. had to hack my DvD player to get rid of something like macro vision so i could copy DvDs to VHS

 

[.Cask]

Had to do a system rollback. None of the progs designed to get around it worked, and setting TV as primary display caused all kinds of problems.

Bit of a bastard when their copy protection stops me from watching my legitimatley aquired DVD's (as well as the not so legitimate ones ).

Gonna have to be really careful about which drivers I install now.