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How can I watch a video in full screen on multiple monitors?

I'm using Windows 7 x64 and I can only make it go full screen on one monitor.

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  • What application are you using to play video? Is it a flash player, like youtube or vimeo? Aug 13, 2012 at 22:29
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    Software recommendations are off-topic for Super User. If you're looking to figure out how to perform a specific task, I would rephrase your question as such. Feel free to use this meta post as reference. Aug 13, 2012 at 22:32
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    @KronoS I understand you comment below, but not the one above. The question is perfectly phrased IMHO. He is asking "if (and perhaps how) it's possible to watch videos on multimonitor" Aug 13, 2012 at 22:38
  • @djechelon the problem that I see is that he's asking if and only if something is possible which will lead to a lot of answers of "yes look at XX product" and that's it. There needs to be a little more detail behind it IMO. It's better to ask, "How do I do something" and the answer to be "you can't" than to ask, "is this possbile". Aug 13, 2012 at 22:41
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    @KronoS this question seems perfectly appropriate in its present form.
    – nhinkle
    Aug 14, 2012 at 2:51

3 Answers 3

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I am assuming that your video card can handle multi monitor. Fire up VLC with the video you want to play then head to Tools/Adjustments and Effect click on the Video Effect tab choose Wall and set how many rows and columns you need to span the video on to.

Example of what it should look like to be able to span the video on to 4 different monitors:

enter image description here

Or you can clone your video across multiple monitors. To do that first you have to disable Overlay under Video Settings in your VLC's Preferences as in the following example:

enter image description here

And then go back to Tools/Adjustments and Effect click on the Video Effect and click on the Advanced tab and choose how many clones you want to have. It should look like this:

enter image description here

I hope this covers the topic. :)

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    This isn't the same as full screen (complete image) on each monitor which is what I think the OP wants.
    – martineau
    Aug 14, 2012 at 1:27
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    Hm. I'm not quite sure if this does exactly what the OP wants, but it looks really neat regardless.
    – nhinkle
    Aug 14, 2012 at 2:52
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    When doing this, is it possible to full-screen (double-click) each window individually to achieve the OP's desired effect? Aug 14, 2012 at 14:12
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    @DarthAndroid I couldn't get it full-screen simultaneously neither with wall nor with clone. The window decorators are here always visible. I have tried it in linux with VLC 2.0.1.
    – Alberto
    Aug 20, 2012 at 12:15
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    nice. @darth: Window decoration can be taken care of: borders can be set in windows's settings, and i guess i can write a simple program to take care of all decorations of a given window. Aug 3, 2014 at 19:29
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It is possible to do this (and anything else that can be maximized to a full screen) with a hardware solution. This is how corporations (and now, consumers) have been doing it for a long time.

It's better than a software solution, in my opinion, because it would be completely transparant to the software. For all it knows, you just have a really big screen.

For years, you could do this by buying a Matrox Multi-monitor Adapter. This will hook up between your graphics card and displays, and essentially make your multiple monitors appears as one large display to your computer.

These days, you can do something similar with most graphics cards, however. NVidia has their NVidia Surround (which they, these days, term "3D Surround" to show that it supports stereoscopic 3D as well, though you don't need to use it). This will let you stretch a desktop across three displays, driving them from two SLI'd graphics cards.

AMD has a similar technology called Eyefinity. The interesting thing about Eyefinity is that, if you get the right graphics cards, you could theoretically drive up to 24 displays simultaneously, and treat it as a single desktop. However, to get 24 displays, you would have to run a quad-Crossfire setup where each of the 4 cards drive 6 displays.

They actually did this back in 2009 during a demo: Quad-Crossfire Eyefinity with 24 displays

Once you configure the settings in the driver utilities (for NVidia Surround or AMD Eyefinity), you should be able to play your movie in any video player that you'd like, make it full screen, and you'll see it span across all your displays.

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    This is the best way to go about this. However, one point of order - Eyefinity does not let you set up display groups across GPUs at the present time, at least in the publically available drivers. So, if you have six four-output cards, you can only have six 2x2 arrays. As of this writing, nobody but Matrox supports this functionality (and they only support it on two cards, so theoretically up to 16 screens if you're using the very expensive M9188s)
    – Shinrai
    Aug 14, 2012 at 14:13
  • @Shinrai I am unsure about this. Do you have a source? Unfortunately, since I don't work for AMD anymore, I can't confirm in person. :) It seems odd that if they could do it in 2009 at least internally, we wouldn't have the capability by now. And by the way, it's 4 6-output cards. :) Aug 16, 2012 at 14:46
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    I am my own source; my company specializes in this sort of thing, so I have actually tried this firsthand. (And I know you said four six-output cards, but the system I last tried it on had six four-output cards, so... :3) We've asked them about it and not really gotten a good answer...I'd honestly guess you run into problems with Windows not being able to handle it well at that scale in a production environment. Hell, we see issues with DWM with that many monitors in independent mode sometimes!
    – Shinrai
    Aug 16, 2012 at 15:03
  • @Shinrai Ah, well thanks, then! I wonder if I can exercise my old contacts at AMD and try and get an answer, that way. I actually know one of the driver folks. I pushed on them to get crossfire+hd3d working, last year. :P Aug 16, 2012 at 15:18
  • I would be curious to know.
    – Shinrai
    Aug 16, 2012 at 16:06
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enter image description hereYes, the piece of software I've used to do that is called Ultramon. Here's where you identify that you want all your monitors joined into a single resolution (treated as a single monitor).

Here's an article about it doing exactly what you are asking for: http://articles.multi-monitors.com/ultramon-a-smart-multi-monitor-utility/

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  • I know ultramon has a button to maximize to all screens, but does that work for full-screen applications, like VLC or windows media player, which don't have window chrome or the associated buttons? Aug 13, 2012 at 22:31
  • Ultramon doesn't make full-screen video work this way.
    – Shinrai
    Aug 13, 2012 at 22:31
  • @Shinrai - According to them and the article I referenced it does.
    – Everett
    Aug 13, 2012 at 22:42
  • @Everett - It absolutely doesn't do that. What you've got there, while it's worded superficially similar to EyeFinity or Mosaic, doesn't give you a single virtual monitor made of 1x3 displays - it simply arranges them for you. It's a shortcut to avoid dragging the icons around. There's no way to do this without involving the video driver (or at least some kind of wrapper).
    – Shinrai
    Aug 14, 2012 at 0:41

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