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How to use your laptop screen as a portable monitor

da na

Note: This is not particularly smooth, so you wouldn't want to do this for gaming or media.

However, if you need to configure a thin client or embedded device but don't want to carry a whole monitor with you (and find an outlet to plug it into), you can use your laptop and a cheap capture card to do the job.

I use this card in particular but really any will work, they all have the same chip inside until the $80~ price point. 

The HDMI capture device does not give EDID (or at least correct EDID) to the device on the other end so the image won't look perfect - but unless you want to spend $100+ on a bulkier capture card you'll run into that issue.

 

You'll want to plug the capture device into a USB 3.0 port (HAS to be 3.0 unless you want a bad time) on your device, then open VLC Media Player. Press Ctrl+C or navigate to Media > Open Capture Device. Under video device name, you'll have Default, your laptop's webcam, then the capture card (likely called USB3.0 capture). Select the USB capture card. I recommend a resolution of 1280x720, the capture card can handle that smoothly enough, anything higher can cause lag. Then, this is very important - select "Show more options" and input between 1 and 10ms for the caching. The default 300ms is not a nice experience at all. 

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Then just select play and boom, you're using the HDMI device through your laptop's screen.

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(Ignore the monitor in the photo...)

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