This is assuming you have set up the restricted nvidia driver in Ubuntu, your LCD monitor is working, and you want to add a TV for playing movies. Open a terminal and type these three commands seperately. The first backs up your xorg.conf

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

The next one creates a working xorg.conf for us to use.

sudo nvidia-xconfig

And this one opens the nvidia settings tool with sudo so we can save our changes.

sudo nvidia-settings

Under X Server Display Configuration “Detect Displays”, “Configure…” and configure the monitors as “Separate X Screens”, set the resolutions right, and Save to X Configuration File. Here is how I set mine up.

Then open a terminal and type

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

In my case my tv is CRT-0 with a resolution of 1360×768. My LCD is CRT-1 with a resolution of 1680×1050. Find the line than says

Option "metamodes" "CRT-0: 1360x768 +0+0"

and change it to

Option "metamodes" "CRT-0: 1680x1050@1360x768 +0+0"

This will squeeze the 1680 screen into a 1360 container (as far as I understand). Before finding this, I was missing the right side and bottom of the screen.

Restart X and you should have your regular LCD setup, and another X screen for your TV.

If you run into trouble editing xorg.conf, you still have a backup. Boot to a console and type

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak /etc/X11/xorg.conf

CONFIGURING VLC

Then in VLC, go to Tools > Preferences > Show Settings – All > Video, check Fullscreen Video and uncheck Embedded Video. This separates the controls from the fullscreen output so you can control it with your computer (my TV is in another room).

Then go to Output Modules, and select an output type (in my case XVideo) and then set it up to match your configuration. Here is mine.

You can find these values in nvidia settings to some degree, and the rest is just finding a match. I found I had to restart VLC after each change to take effect.

I had a lot of trouble with this before and was cloning the monitor output, then switching my resolution to 1360×768 each time. I find this to be a much better solution, but I can’t promise anything, it’s just the way it worked for me. Good luck!

Here is some links that I bookmarked along the way. Thanks to everyone that helped!

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/6386
http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/2986
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/dual-monitors-with-nvidia.html
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=31726
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=54263
http://navetz.com/view.php?id=132
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=221174