Raspberry Pi streaming computer screen?

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solival

157 posts

Master Geek

# 1041997 12-May-2014 09:57

Hmm.. You have quite interesting question.
I'd recommend to check VNC/RDP first. At least you will see advantages/disadvantages of this solution.

Remote desktops usually allows you to work with programs remotely, while chromecase and similar allows you to watch streaming videos (raspberry also can do that right?). This is because video streaming is quite hard thing. It is either enormous in traffic for raw videos (and even motion jpg) or high load for well compressed (like mp4). That's why you have two types of utils. However, times changed and modern computers are powerful enough to encode video stream into mp4 (xvid, h.264, etc).

So I'm sure that there some utilities that stream screen output encoded in reasonable bit rate. If you had linux on your PC you could just run

ffmpeg -framerate ntsc -video_size 640x480 -f x11grab -i :0.0 -vcodec libx264 -crf 26 -preset fast -f mpegts udp://<ip>:<port>

This stream can be played fullscreen on raspberry using mplayer or vlc. You will need to play with choosing right codec and bitrate for raspberry.
For mouse and keyboard sharing you can use synergy. It should be compiled for raspberry. Just configure remote pc on raspberry client as left or right screen.

There is ffmpeg for windows as well, so might be this approach will work for you.
Anyway, I will not be surprised if there are some utilities that already use this approach in some good front-end app.

UPD. After quick googling, found article that might help you: http://nerdlogger.com/2011/11/03/stream-your-windows-desktop-using-ffmpeg/

computernutter

15 posts

Geek

# 1042323 12-May-2014 14:04

thanks a lot that is very helpful, might have to install linux next to windows...

timmmay

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# 1042352 12-May-2014 14:45

Maybe you need to either reconsider or restate your requirements. What do you want to see on the screen? Are you just doing youtube and videos? Do you need a bigger screen for your laptop for work? Bit hard to solve a problem we don't understand fully.

Ragnor

8033 posts

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# 1042578 12-May-2014 19:11

solival:

UPD. After quick googling, found article that might help you: http://nerdlogger.com/2011/11/03/stream-your-windows-desktop-using-ffmpeg

That's an interesting option, they also have an earlier article using VLC to stream
http://nerdlogger.com/2008/03/31/stream-your-linuxmacwindows-desktop-as-video-using-vlc-part-ii/

computernutter

15 posts

Geek

# 1043394 14-May-2014 08:58

hi there, requirements are: send screen to raspberry pi wireless. So I was hoping that someone had done this and could tell me how he did it.

However it seems that you want some reasons why I want it this way:

1. often the websites do not play or display properly on my wifi internet TV

2. sometimes there are lots of ads (no ad blocker installed on the TV)

3. sometimes I want to demonstrate what to do on the computer and the computer screen is too small for a few people to see at the same time

4. sometimes I want to watch a movie on the TV in the bedroom and I do not want to carry everything around all the time with cables and stuff

5. I do not want to hook up the computer to the TV with cables because I hate all the cabling and there is little room where the TV is

6. if I use the laptop I want to have on my lap in front of the sofa to type onto and not have to crouch in front of the TV to type things

7. I sometimes want to use the laptop displayed on the TV and sometimes the PC (which is too heavy to log around anyway)

8. I simply want to be flexible and I heard that it is possible

9. I want to experiment with the PI

10. I do not want to spend any more money on this

so my thinking was that if I find a free software (or at least a cheap software) that can be installed on the windows 7 platform and on the linux PI (or 2 different ones for that matter) then I should be sweet. Technically I cannot see why it should not be possible except maybe that the PI is not powerful enough, but it does play videos, so why not a simple windows screen (unless it needs a higher resolution than videos)

and unrelated to all this: Why do I need to fiddle around with 2 million different video standards, software that is not compatible and bloody plugs that are all different and you need thousands of adapters? That is a rhetorical question, no answer needed, I just wanted to vent off a bit... (if you don' mind)

HiroProtagonist

46 posts

Geek

# 1043672 14-May-2014 12:30

computernutter: hi there, requirements are: send screen to raspberry pi wireless. So I was hoping that someone had done this and could tell me how he did it. However it seems that you want some reasons why I want it this way: 1. often the websites do not play or display properly on my wifi internet TV 2. sometimes there are lots of ads (no ad blocker installed on the TV) 3. sometimes I want to demonstrate what to do on the computer and the computer screen is too small for a few people to see at the same time 4. sometimes I want to watch a movie on the TV in the bedroom and I do not want to carry everything around all the time with cables and stuff 5. I do not want to hook up the computer to the TV with cables because I hate all the cabling and there is little room where the TV is 6. if I use the laptop I want to have on my lap in front of the sofa to type onto and not have to crouch in front of the TV to type things 7. I sometimes want to use the laptop displayed on the TV and sometimes the PC (which is too heavy to log around anyway) 8. I simply want to be flexible and I heard that it is possible 9. I want to experiment with the PI 10. I do not want to spend any more money on this so my thinking was that if I find a free software (or at least a cheap software) that can be installed on the windows 7 platform and on the linux PI (or 2 different ones for that matter) then I should be sweet. Technically I cannot see why it should not be possible except maybe that the PI is not powerful enough, but it does play videos, so why not a simple windows screen (unless it needs a higher resolution than videos) and unrelated to all this: Why do I need to fiddle around with 2 million different video standards, software that is not compatible and bloody plugs that are all different and you need thousands of adapters? That is a rhetorical question, no answer needed, I just wanted to vent off a bit... (if you don' mind)

Displaying your computer desktop over a network connection at a high enough framerate to display video is a difficult problem. Not impossible, but you might have to jump through quite a few hoops to make it happen.

It seems like you want to do 2 things:

a) Display video on the TV via wifi using the pi.

b) Display your laptop screen on the TV.

For a) there seems to be no pressing reason to involve your laptop [unless you're sourcing the video from there]. Raspbmc is quite capable of playing video via network shares or via the internet.

For b) VNC et al provide adequate solutions, but note you can't display video this way - the framerate isn't high enough.

As a side note, if you want to stream 1080p video over wifi, you may find it works or you may encounter issues if you have interference or other wifi users. Wired ethernet will give more reliable performance. This is nothing to do with the Pi, rather it is due to the increased latency you'll see with wifi, plus the fact that it's a shared medium.

timmmay

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# 1043700 14-May-2014 12:38

A long HDMI cable is a more practical solution to this problem.

computernutter

15 posts

Geek

# 1043739 14-May-2014 12:53

"take a long cable...": with all due respect, I see you have a lot of posts already, but this is not really a helpful advice. Plus how do you think I am managing at the moment? I have a long cable and I can also access my video files that I have on the computer via TV or PI. But that is not a satisfying solution because of the reasons stated above. I was really hoping that somebody with experience about this issue could help.

timmmay

15206 posts

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# 1043746 14-May-2014 12:58

I'm just a simple, practical solution architect. You've told us a bit about what you want to do, not much about why or your motivations. Often going back to look at the "why" can help determine the "how".

computernutter

15 posts

Geek

# 1043827 14-May-2014 13:49

Hi I appreciate practical and simple solutions. In this case I want more practical (I understand that it is not that simple in this case).

So what I want and why I want it I explained:

1. often the websites do not play or display properly on my wifi internet TV

2. sometimes there are lots of ads (no ad blocker installed on the TV) and I don't like too many ads, that is why

3. sometimes I want to demonstrate what to do on the computer and the computer screen is too small for a few people to see at the same time

4. sometimes I want to watch a movie on the TV in the bedroom and I do not want to carry everything around all the time with cables and stuff

5. I do not want to hook up the computer to the TV with cables because I hate all the cabling and there is little room where the TV is, why? I don't know, ask the architect

6. if I use the laptop I want to have on my lap in front of the sofa to type onto and not have to crouch in front of the TV to type things, or use long cables, why? because I sometimes stumble over them...

7. I sometimes want to use the laptop displayed on the TV and sometimes the PC (which is too heavy to log around anyway), why? because I don't have the 2 synchronized and I have stuff on one but not on the other, I know I should synchronize but I am too slack...

8. I simply want to be flexible and I heard that it is possible, I always like to be flexible, why? that's just how I am

9. I want to experiment with the PI 10. Why? Again just me being me and curious...

solival

157 posts

Master Geek

# 1043841 14-May-2014 14:03

Actually it looks that you in situation when you can get cheap, high quality and high performance solution. Choose any two.
If you want high quality and high speed you can but HDMI 5 GHz transmitter receiver, but it is expensive.
For cheap and high quality you can choose streaming over ffmpeg/VLC, but it might lag for games and may be even for browsing
For cheap and high performance you might use VNC/RDP, but it will not stream any movies or games, or just use low resolutions and low quality on solution above.
Don't know what else could help, sorry...
From some ideas for further research. There is feature on SteamOS allowing you to play windows games on steam OS (which is Linux). They do this by actual running the game on a windows machine and somehow streaming picture back to steam OS. As it's for gaming, their approach should have high speed and high quility in the same time without buying expensive hardware. May be what they do can actualy be used for desktop streaming.

computernutter

15 posts

Geek

# 1043860 14-May-2014 14:25

Thanks for that. I am actually not playing games on the computer, that is my iron rule. So the speed thing is not so important for me, but watching youtube videos for example and as I said the TV browser is quite tedious for that. PI is much better in that respect but sometimes not powerful enough.

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