Flash (Hulu etc) full screen on one of multiple monitors under Mac OS X:
Unfortunately, flash video on all platforms suffers from an extremely irritating design decision. If you watch Flash video full-screen on one monitor, any clicks elsewhere, even on another monitor, will switch the flash player back to windowed mode. Windows users have a few options to patch the Flash library, including IgnoFlash to fix this irritating bug.
In an attempt to procrastinate from writing my thesis, I discovered a simply work-around for Flash on the Mac.
How to play Flash video full screen on one monitor and work on the other:
- Open up any PDF in Preview on your non-video monitor. Make sure that it's the top window.
- Start your Flash video playing and switch it to fullscreen.
- Move your mouse to the PDF, and click in it.
- Voilá, Preview traps the click and prevents Flash from seeing it!
Update: This doesn't work on another Mac that I've tested. Instead, after switching Flash to full-screen, I hold down the right-mouse button on the title bar of another window, and left click, then release the left then right buttons. Weird, but that seems to work on this other Mac.
You can then continue to work as per normal, while watching Flash in full-screen mode. Note that this has only been tested with Mac OS X 10.6.7 and Flash 10.3. Let me know if it works for you as well!
