I'm trying to achieve video out on an ati radeon 9800 pro card using
the s-video and the dvi out. I would like video to display
simultaniously to both devices. I'm running windows XP and can use any
media player required althought I would like for as little cost to be
involved as possible. Currently I'm using VLC with the default ATI
drivers and I'm not achieving any results. The videos that are
required to be played range from real media, to quicktime, to various
encoded avi's and windows media video files. So to sum it up, I need
to be able to play all kinds of video through my existing hardware
without spending anything if I can help it. Is there a software
solution avaliable?

Have you checked ATi's Hydrovision which allows multiple monitors from one source?
DVI would go to a computer monitor, while the S-Video is more suited
to TV monitor's.
Find your ATI Hydrovision folder in your start menu
(Start--->Programs--->ATI Hydrovision). You can set things up with the
wizard. It allows you to 'clone' [display the same thing on both
screens], or stretch [i don't know the actual word](which allows you
to have much larger desktop spaces, e.g. standard 4:3, now can be 8:3)
But for playing back video's it doesn't matter what output device (DVI
or S-Video), it depends on your codecs which can be found here;
://www.google.com.au/search?q=video+codecs&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
Top of the list is DivX which is very useful

Yes, I have recently checked into it since I'm running an ATI card.
While it allows you to use multiple dektops and clone single desktops
the video will still not apear on both outputs at the same time. As
far as details of the output, I'm running s-video to a tv and the DVI
to a projector. Wish this solution would have worked as it would have
been an easy fix. : /