Multi-monitor setups are virtually a necessity for these of us who do Severe Work⢠with our computer systems. In my case, that work is often writing. However even that advantages from my dual-monitor setup, because it lets me use one display for my phrase processor and the opposite display for my analysis in a browser. Pierre Couy is a software program developer who additionally likes to make use of two screens, however he made the error of buying a laptop computer that solely had a single HDMI port. To resolve this drawback, he used a Raspberry Pi to present his laptop computer a second HDMI port.
Like most trendy laptops, the mannequin Couy bought does have an HDMI port. However Couy did not wish to use the laptop computer’s built-in display â he wished to make use of two exterior screens. His earlier laptop computer supported Show Port over USB-C along with the HDMI port, so connecting two exterior screens wasn’t an issue. The brand new laptop computer, nevertheless, did not have the Show Port assist. That meant that Couy may solely use the laptop computer’s display and a single exterior monitor. Fortunately, he was capable of finding an answer within the kind a Raspberry Pi single-board pc that streams one other desktop feed to a second exterior monitor.
Couy’s preliminary resolution was what most of us would have tried: he put in a VNC server on the laptop computer and an VNC shopper on the Raspberry Pi 3 Mannequin B. However that stretched the Pi’s processing energy a bit an excessive amount of, because it required a full desktop setting with the VNC shopper working in a window. VNC can be notoriously laggy.
That led to Couy to a customized resolution, which makes use of ffmpeg working on the laptop computer to stream a video feed of an X server digital desktop to the Raspberry Pi working ffplay. That is an oversimplification, as Couy needed to do numerous tweaking to get the best configuration for a clean stream. The stream travels by way of Ethernet connections, which permits for top bandwidth. However Couy nonetheless needed to cut back the body price to maintain the latency down and the stream clean.
As Couy notes in his write-up, there are different options. However it is a easy technique to reap the benefits of customary Linux utilities and an inexpensive Raspberry Pi so as to add an exterior monitor.
