Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 167 posts

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#111

Post by __mharrison__ »

prmoustache wrote: post #63
mleo wrote: post #39

This is great; though I have less need for it day to day now. I used to have 49" 5120x1440 display. We started with Zoom, which under Advanced would allow partial desktop sharing. I would draw a 1920x1080 box and move windows in and out of the box. We moved to Teams and Teams only supports Window or Screen sharing. DeskPad would work great for that situation. Create a virtual display, share it and then use it on righ…

Why do change the resolution instead of the scaling?

Notched MBPs can't do HD through resolution changing. (I would love to be proven wrong on this. See my other comment for hoops I jump through to get around this.)

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#112

Post by __mharrison__ »

blsv wrote: post #33
neLrivVK wrote: post #28

I’ve been using https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay for this purpose. Does something similar and more. Works great!

Which feature do you use? Would like to try it as well.

I have a big comment around my usage of BetterDisplay in another thread.

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#113

Post by sadeshmukh »

lolinder wrote: post #77
wpm wrote: post #65

I've gotten away with simply firing up OBS and "screen sharing" the virtual camera. Has worked fine on Zoom and Slack huddles, with the added benefit of giving me other things that OBS can provide: easy recording, scenes, text, source management, plugins, etc. For a casual conversation it's somewhat overkill, but when you're doing something more serious or formal, or need to switch between a keynote/Powerpoint and a…

> and actually rather easy to get going in. The other day I tried installing OBS on a Mac and this was not my experience. I couldn't even get it to recognize the built-in MacBook camera, much less share a screen or a mic or... I've successfully got OBS set up on Linux in the past and managed to get a simple workflow running, but even that took a lot of fiddling to get started and I had the darndest time finding what…

You have to install with admin, and everything then works entirely out of the box. I get away with ignoring most of it, and everything there is really intuitive after a day or so. Probably the most intuitive setup I've seen.

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#114

Post by kyriakos »

nashashmi wrote: post #58

Windows has a similar tool. But it’s two steps. 1. Set up a new virtual monitor (see https://github.com/itsmikethetech/Virtual-Display-Driver ) 2. See virtual monitor using google chrome desktop.

https://github.com/tom-englert/RegionToShare Or use this

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#115

Post by p4bl0 »

This is for macOS only, which should be reflected in the title. For those using Linux, I wanted to achieve the same thing a few years ago and ended up using Xephyr, which is a nested X11 server that gives you another display (not the same thing as a virtual monitor). I remember having quite a hard time to get that setup working but I don't remember what made it difficult… The idea of a virtual monitor that continues yours on the left or right side of your screen like an actual external monitor is actually pretty neat, it offers a much more frictionless usage than an entirely separate display. I wonder if there an easy way to do this on Linux.

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#117

Post by wenbert »

It's not mentioned here yet, but since this provides some kind of virtual display, you can use this with https://deskreen.com/ - if you have an tablet that does not support sidecar then this is a viable option for an extended display. Setup is a bit of a hassle but it works.

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#118

Post by trabant00 »

A bit off-topic but the number of IT workers still using small 1080p monitors in 2024 is absolutely shocking to me.

If you are one of the "I don't want a monitor that is too big" people: a larger (30+ inch diagonal) monitor allows you to place it further from your eyes which is the number one eye health and comfort factor. So the relative size of the display does not change, you won't have to move your head to see all of it. And you can scale up your display to >1 factor so the text won't be small either for hidpi displays. There's absolutely no downside to having a large diagonal large dpi display, aside from needing a wider desk if you have a very narrow one now.

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#119

Post by dudeism_est_03 »

gechr wrote: post #78

After trying various solutions - including DeskPad - I came up with a custom cross-platform (I'm on macOS, but assume it'll work elsewhere) solution that worked incredibly well on my 40" ultrawide monitor: OBS[1]. Having never used OBS before but knowing it was popular among streamers, I wondered if I could use it to (1) only share the specific applications I wanted to share and (2) share them at a resolution that pe…

My main work machine is also a Mac and I found the accessibility zoom a really useful and quick feature. I simply share my entire screen or a window in whatever meeting/share app and then use a 3-finger gesture and Cmd+ or Cmd- to zoom in and out. That zoom level is fully passed on by the screen share.

Obviously this feature has to be enabled and wasn’t intended for this purpose but it works perfectly!

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#120

Post by prmoustache »

naikrovek wrote: post #104
prmoustache wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do change the resolution instead of the scaling?

That’s what changing the resolution on MacOS does. On Windows, resolution and DPI are separate settings. On MacOS they are combined into a single “resolution” and you pick from a list that makes sense for the display in question. You pick the “effective resolution“ of the display, but the native screen resolution is always used and the DPI is changed to scale things up or down until they are scaled the same they woul…

Thanks, makes sense.
Post reply on HN