iTunes movie playlist full-screen on tv for only the first one

Hi,

I am experimenting with getting what's on my MacBook Pro (15" 2ghz quad core, bought 5/11) displayed/played on my HD TV. I have tried all kinds of approaches (XBMC, Plex, Boxee (the software version), Front Row, Miro, Serviio, TV Mobli, Twonky, and who knows what else on the MBP as well as XBMC on an older Powerbook as well as using DirecTV's Media Share) but none are satisfactory. The current approach is to connect the MBP to the TV by a display port to HDMI cable.

The problem I am having is: when using iTunes to play movies on a playlist, I can get the TV to display the first movie as full-screen but when it comes to the next one, I lose full-screen. It reverts back to the original size of the video. When I play the same playlist on the MBP display, successive movies stay in full-screen. (Of the two movies i have tested, the first is an mp4; the next one is an m4v.)

Is there any way I can get movies played on an iTunes playlist to stay full-screen when displayed on the TV?

All of my movies are things I've recorded with EyeTV or otherwise captured or digitized and most are converted to QT. Some are flash, some are Mpegs and I may have a few other formats. Nothing has DRM. I don't have any copyrighted "real" movies; they're all little things (music videos, segment from home movies, etc) I have put together. (Features like "scraping" with Plex for example, are completely worthless/inappropriate for me and otherwise ruin what could be a good approach to dealing with all of my media.)

I would also be curious about anyone's ideas about the best way overall to display movies and pictures from the MBP onto the TV. For streaming video I will just drag a browser window over to the TV and then go full-screen. That works for me. It is important that I keep the MBP display free for the usual computer stuff. I don't want it blacked out or otherwise made useless so any suggestion has to bear that in mind. So far I can do almost all that I want but I haven't settled on the best way yet.

I am ok with having to switch the audio output on the preference pane to the TV when I do this.

I am having one other issue: Sometimes I will lose audio half-way into one of these short movies (3-4 minutes long) on my iTunes playlist. I have dragged the movie window back to the MBP display and it still has no audio. I will then restart that movie and it will play fine on the MBP. I don't know what is going on with that. I am worried that the cable may not be able to carry audio ALL the time but why would I still get no audio when I have dragged the movie window back to the MBP if the cable was at fault? Any ideas on what is going on here?

Many thanks.

John L