03-10-2009, 05:32 PM
olnacl wrote: I've had no luck watching a movie on the built in LCD. I tried DVD player.app and VLC on a movie I copied to the SSD card. None worked. Please tell me what I did wrong. In my case, it's an (mostly) uncompressed version, about 4.33 GB. I'm in the process of copying another movie to a USB drive and I'll try it again with VLC.
OTOH, External monitor works fine on VGA out mine, a 19" Fuji and I've also used it with a 1920x1080 37" monitor. The built-in monitor goes dark, just like my MBP, but if I close the lid it goes to sleep (unlike m MBP).
OK, I lied. Copied a Toast DVD image to my 8 GB flash drive, opened VLC, navigated to the .VOB file and it's playing (on the fuji monitor anyway).
My theory is that the Atom chip has finite capacity handling I/O, decompressing data, and playing video. I suspect the unusual screen size on the MacinDell requires some video conversion on-the-fly, so with high bandwidth (ie uncompressed) video files, the I/O and heavy video resizing demands swamp the processor's ability to play it.
VGA is less demanding, so it can handle playback.