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More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 25 for Windows => Topic started by: JustinChase on May 21, 2019, 10:33:04 am

Title: detached display, anyone else using it?
Post by: JustinChase on May 21, 2019, 10:33:04 am
The very best part of MC, for me, is the ability to detach the display and have a re-sizeable video window playing over the top of any other program I'm using while I work.  I use it all the time.

I've suggested a few improvements over the years, but it's never gotten any response or improvement since it debuted.

That tells me no one else seems to care about it's little issues, maybe because it's just not used by many people.  I wanted to post my suggestions again for MC 25, but before I did, I wanted to see if I'm the only one using it, and if so, I'll just stop trying to get it improved.
Title: Re: detached display, anyone else using it?
Post by: rossp on May 22, 2019, 05:42:30 am

I use it all the time to play video / tv on my second monitor. I have three 22 inch monitors and a large flat screen TV above them (very starship enterprise). Sometime ago Matt made a change to stop the screen saver activating when the display was detached which makes it much better for me.

What changes do you suggest?

Ross
Title: Re: detached display, anyone else using it?
Post by: rossp on May 22, 2019, 06:10:55 am

One thing I would like is a second detached display so you could be looking at images in detached display 1 and then display the map of where that image was taken in detached display 2. This would all be controlled from standard view.
IMHO this would make looking at images a lot better as I like to see where they were taken.
However I think the image section of MC is it's poorest feature.

Ross
Title: Re: detached display, anyone else using it?
Post by: JustinChase on May 22, 2019, 08:19:27 am
What changes do you suggest?

I want to see the ability/option to have the detached window automatically resize itself to match the aspect ratio of any playing video.  In other words, it should never show any extra space around the video.  I am always having to manually resize the window to remove extra space.  I want to be able to grab any border of a playing video and push or pull it to resize the overall size, but not change the aspect ratio.

I also want the top border to go away, and have the min/max/close buttons just appear over the video when I move my mouse over the playing video.

I want the detached video to take no more space than is absolutely required to display the video, automatically.
Title: Re: detached display, anyone else using it?
Post by: kendoken on July 03, 2019, 08:37:11 pm
ross in a comment said Matt had deactivated the screen saver when a second display was being used. i feed my audio to a amp via usb steinberg driver to yamaha, and the display to a large screen tv. when the time for the screen saver comes up, windows goes to the screen saver and locks up mc. how do i avoid this without changing the settings on my screen saver in win10 or do i just have to set the delay for the screensaver to be longer before it kicks in???   in other words how does matt set it up to stop the screen saver from activating while mc is playing??
Title: Re: detached display, anyone else using it?
Post by: rossp on July 04, 2019, 01:25:01 am
I believe the screensaver deactivation is for video playback only. I think we need to understand why the screensaver is locking MC up. It does not on mine.

What version of MC is it? OS version etc. Custom screensaver or regular? What is the exact setup.
PC + screen + TV + amp? TV via hdmi?

Also what are you playing when the screensaver activates, video or audio?

Ross
Title: Re: detached display, anyone else using it?
Post by: kendoken on July 04, 2019, 09:37:39 am
The screen saver is just the one on windows 10 most recent 1903 version build 18362.207. It uses images randomly generated from a folder on the hard drive. It is set to start at about 15 minutes and then goes to the lock screen when i come back and move the mouse. I had windows displaying on my flat screen tv via hdmi and set up as a mirrored monitor.  the regular computer monitor was displaying the list view of a playlist i downloaded from itunes inside the new mc25. the audio is fed through usb steinberg driver to the input on a yamaha a-s801 amplifier. when the screen saver cut in on the computer, the display on the tv went to the random image display on the computer monitor. when i got up and moved the mouse, the login screen came up, i logged in, and when i did mc25 was frozen. i used task manager to close it. i would have thought that windows would know a audio program like mc was running and would not have gone to the screen saver in the first place. i run netflix on the same machine, and windows does not go to screen saver while a movie is playing. that is why i thought it unusual for the screen saver to start up while mc25 was playing. but you are right, since netflix is a video app and mc25 was only doing audio. Its no big deal to change the timing on the screen saver to a longer period or deactivate it entirely, but then i would be constantly turning it off and on depending on whether i was using mc25 or not at the time.
Title: Re: detached display, anyone else using it?
Post by: leezer3 on July 04, 2019, 10:04:43 am
I use the detached display for image playback most days.

Resizing automatically in this case would be awful; My standard playlist runs on a 15s image change timer, and I'd guess the images are split 50 / 50 between portrait and landscape with a few outliers.
With this sort of behaviour, it'd be changing size constantly.

In some respects, I'd quite like the ability to drop other windows on top of a detached display, but that's the only real tweak I'd like for my use case.
Title: Re: detached display, anyone else using it?
Post by: DocLotus on July 04, 2019, 01:37:10 pm
I use it to watch the TV news (in the lower right corner of Windows) while doing other things in Windows. Works well enough for me.
Title: Re: detached display, anyone else using it?
Post by: RoderickGI on July 04, 2019, 06:19:43 pm
I also use it occasionally to watch live TV while using my workstation. News or some event usually. I think your suggested changes would be good JustinChase.
Title: Re: detached display, anyone else using it?
Post by: jachin99 on July 04, 2019, 10:06:57 pm
If we could view 2 or more files or channels at once via detached displays I think that would be useful.