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DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

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Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#131

Post by eqvinox »

badmintonbaseba wrote: post #123
eqvinox wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just start Xephyr, it gives you an X server in a window. Needs a few lines of setup around it to get a window manager or desktop session on that window.

Is it possible for that setup to show up as a virtual display on your main WM/DE, so you just extend to it, or does it need to run its own, separate instance? Can you drag a window from your main DE to the virtual display?

With Xephyr, it's a separate instance per se. I've never tried attaching it to an existing session; this is total half-knowledge but it might have been possible with the old Xinerama protocol (which has been replaced with Xrandr). With the move to Wayland, it's all a bit of a moot point either way...

(You can absolutely use Xephyr on a Wayland session of course, since the latter is compatible with X11 clients. But the virtual display Xephyr provides is X11.)

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#132

Post by interludead »

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…

DeskPad definitely seems like it would have been a perfect fit for your transition

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#133

Post by interludead »

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?

Might be a matter of clarity and precision

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#134

Post by mtam »

I have solved this a while back by connecting my ultra wide monitor twice to the same machine and setting up the monitor to side by side mode. From the OS perspective, it works exactly as if I had two monitors but without the physical bevel/edge in the middle. It is perfect, the only downside is that I lose two USB-C ports, instead of one. It also works 100% on Mac and Windows.

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#135

Post by Jach »

dudeism_est_03 wrote: post #119
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!

Application-independent zoom is such a nice feature. I've been keeping a zombie version of compiz (formerly beryl) on linux working for years, mainly because I love my wobbly windows and desktop cube, but it's long had two features great for screen sharing purposes too: the zooming like you mention (have it bound to meta+scroll wheel) and drawing annotations (alt+meta+left click for free drawing, there's also eraser, erase all, straight lines, and filled rects/ellipses).

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#136

Post by sbarre »

rr60 wrote: post #21
rcarmo wrote: post #3

This is _genius_. I have been using RegionToShare in Windows to share only a section of a widescreen monitor, but didn't have a good Mac equivalent. Now I have something that may well work _just as well_ with Windows inside Parallels (need to try that ASAP, am on the "wrong" Mac now). Edit: A quick test shows that yes, the Windows VM sees the additional display just fine--but, alas, Parallels doesn't let me pass _jus…

+1 for RegionToShare on windows. It's not perfect but it has made sharing on a 49" monitor much much easier.

I will "third" RegionToShare.. Sometimes I need to share many windows in a meeting and rather than share my entire 4k monitor, I can set up a 1080p region with RtS and put a bunch of windows in there to swap between when I'm doing my demo, and it's super useful!

https://github.com/tom-englert/RegionToShare

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#137

Post by sbarre »

mtam wrote: post #134

I have solved this a while back by connecting my ultra wide monitor twice to the same machine and setting up the monitor to side by side mode. From the OS perspective, it works exactly as if I had two monitors but without the physical bevel/edge in the middle. It is perfect, the only downside is that I lose two USB-C ports, instead of one. It also works 100% on Mac and Windows.

Huh this is actually awesome, I need to look if my ultrawide supports side by side ...

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#138

Post by aphit »

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…

Any tutorials or write-ups on how to achieve the blur on certain windows that you bring in? That seems really useful and I haven't seen it before.

Thanks for sharing your method!

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#139

Post by rcarmo »

transfire wrote: post #49
rcarmo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just went to Preferences and set the resolution of the virtual display to 1920x1080.

But doesn’t that affect ALL windows?

Yes, and? You only need to move the window you want to share to that, and at that resolution, without retina, things are pretty readable.

Re: DeskPad – A virtual monitor for screen sharing

#140

Post by dTal »

garysahota93 wrote: post #12

I really like this concept. especially for the use case where I need to share my whole screen, but just want a "sandbox" of sorts to share. Typically have gotten around this with a secondary monitor that I share with, but that doesn't work when I'm on the go with my laptop. Will def be using this

On Linux, a simple solution for this particular use case is to run a VNC server inside xvfb. You get total isolation between your real desktop, and your "sandbox" - no embarrassing notifications! Of course you can't drag windows around from one to the other, but that's what a sandbox does...
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