That would take a special set up and the laptop would have to have a
separate video card for the SVGA output. This is NOT the typical
arrangement in your mill of the run laptop. They have a single video
card, which is generally just a large IC on the motherboard, and the
output from it goes to the LCD panel. That video is also structured
further into the RGB components and sent to the SVGA jack for your
external monitor. But it has the same video as is being sent to the LCD
panel, it is just in a different format and of a somewhat inferior quality.

I believe it takes two video cards to do what you want to do. If you
have an expansion port you could ad a video card and do what you want to do.

When I plug a second monitor into the SVGA port on my laptop, I get a
double-wide desktop. It should be possible to move the video app to the second
screen as long as it wasn't maximized. I don't know what the video app would do
though if the window focus was moved to an app on the main screen.

Without a second video card what is displayed on your laptop screen will
be displayed on the overhead.

i am told there is a problem with this procedure because if you use your mouse
and start clicking around the screen, the media player will know this and will
change somehow.

I have two laptops that are exactly the same, Lenovo 3000 C200, and only one
video card is in each one, Mobile Intel(R) 945GM Express Chipset Family.

One has XP the other one has Ubuntu.

On the one with XP, I have an external monitor and it is set up as a separate
display, I can play a movie on the external and do other stuff on the laptop
screen.

I tried another monitor when I had 9.10 on the Ubuntu machine. I could not get
it set up that way, it always would revert to being the same as the laptop
screen.

I now have 10.04 on here, maybe I will try the monitor again.

I just tried the monitor with 10.04 and the separate displays work.

Is Ubuntu forcing that????????????

Many desktop computers allow for two monitors, which do not display the same
thing, so you could show a video on one display, while doing regular tasks on
the other display. It's well supported in Ubuntu.

My 2002 ECS iBuddie notebook can show video on TV or an external
monitor while doing other things on the computer screen. I think this
is very much the usual situation. It does require a video setting to
dual desktop mode, not clone (same thing on each output) or extended
desktop. Perhaps not all have this but I know my MSI Wind does and
also my friend's Gateway.

Not true, at least under Windows.

I used my WinXP ECS iBuddie notebook for many years with a TV and,
while I didn't do it often, it was able to display 2 separate and
independent screens: movies on the TV and anything else on the
Deskmate's LCD screen. I think it is hardware dependent more than just
software. It may well that some can't do this; my iBuddie was a high
end machine back in 2002 - 2 GHz P-4.

I was saying that you can do it with notebooks. Most (if not all) the notebooks
I've used recently (say, the last ten years) have been able to have different
stuff on internal vs. external screens.

What part are you saying is not true?

I have a client where every Windows PC has two monitors attached to a single
video card, so they can have more programs open at the same time.

I have now learned that some laptops can do the same thing, have different
displays on the built-in monitor and as external one.

If the interface card has multiply cable connections then it has
more than one monitor interface. Otherwise you will need another
interface card. On the laptop you have an internal monitor (screen)
and a video interface connector. The key combinations control which
monitor is being used, and on all I can remember one of the combin-
ations is both, but I don't know if you can use them for different
displayed applications like you can with multiply monitors on a
desktop.

"Not so with laptops." is what I was objecting to.

Thanks for the clarification. I don't own a laptop, but I help people who use
them. I've never seen a laptop which was running Ubuntu, so my comment was about
what I have seen, laptops running Windows, always showing the same thing on
external and internal displays. Turns out my experience is incomplete.

Last month I set up a laptop where it would have been handy to put the
multi-location meeting video on the projector while running Skype on the
internal screen. It never occurred to me that it might be possible, and I'm 99%
certain that it was not, on that particular laptop.