[billyo]

Originally Posted by Singsation

I thought i'd use my Sony Vaio as a back up computer for hoster, I down loaded demo and set up displays and tried it out, All works fine untill you try and play video, it will show video if your show display is on your primary monitor but as soon as you drag the display to your second monitor you just get a black screen where the video should play. After a lot of farting around i found the following post on the webb.

But while it has component output, it won't play movies over component except at 480i (more Sony DRM paranoia). According to Sony, this restriction is a feature, not a bug! You might as well use a $20 DVD player connected to a ten year old TV and save yourself >$2,000.

After multiple calls to Sony support (and one house call) they could not get the video board/driver to output 1280:720 (or any other 16:9 aspect ratio resolution) to my widescreen Philips plasma monitor via HDMI. It only allowed resolutions with a 4:3 aspect ratio, which resulted in very distorted TV and movie playback. Yet the Vaio would output 720p via component to the same monitor! It just wouldn't play movies at that resolution on component-out.

And the Sony graphics card requires custom Sony driver software. So you lose out on the regular updates that nVidia makes to their unified driver architecture.

If you plan to use a widescreen monitor with your Media Center PC (or think you might upgrade to widescreen some day), don't buy the Sony Media PC.
My Vaio is a RC series so i dont know if it's the same on others but it looks as if you have to remove the Nvida 512 mb card and buy a new card.
It does the same on my wifes Vaio laptop as well. so be aware.

you can only now see a video display on your singers screen on 4.08, they took that capabilities due to some people having problems with the new player..i'm nor sure if it is set up the old way, but in order to play /see the video on the singers screen you have to play a kma file first, then drag the screen over to the singers screen, then play a vcd..