Why did you use that approach and not a USB video card?

DisplayLink needs proprietary software I was not willing to install on my laptop, and buying hardware I was not willing to buy

That's an excellent reason. Thanks!

Did you consider using Sunshine/Moonlight? https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine and https://github.com/moonlight-stream

I'm not at my computer rign now, and can't remember if I did, but I'll make sure to keep you updated

Moonlight requires nvidia GPU and GeForce Experience no?

No, both the client (moonlight) and the server (sunshine) support AMD/Intel/nVidia.

Might be useful: "System on a Chip - Benchmark for Moonlight Game Streaming Project" - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WSyOIq9Mn7uTd94PC_LX...

lists the Pi3 as having about 10ms latency at 1080p 60fps.

thanks.

Wanted to write a top level comment to suggest Sunshine/Moonlight too. I've been using it to stream 3.5k@60fps from my midrange gaming PC (Ryzen 5, 3060 Ti) to my Macbook Pro.

I set up a virtual display with my Macbook's native resolution (minus some height because I don't want to overlap with the notch), and it's just perfect, with no perceptible input lag. Sometimes I need to restart Sunshine, but I could just move the PC to the basement and operate it completely remotely (Moonlight supports WoL).

If your host is on latest Win 10/11, you can even get by without a monitor or HDMI dummy: https://www.reddit.com/r/MoonlightStreaming/comments/rzpcpc/...

Thanks for that link! I've been meaning to write the EDID to the dummy dongle I have to enable resolutions/refresh using CRU. But I think I'll dive into this first.

I too have a workstation/gaming pc presently in the basement, for about a year it lived ~15km away. I used Parsec at first but migrated to Sunshine when I started using Linux clients due to the more recent Parsec clients dropping GPU acceleration.

I just got a refund on my Lenovo X1 Nano laptops because they were non functioning after years of service troubleshooting. (Nightmare experience, ThinkPads are not what they used to be!) Took my money and got a MacBook Pro, Streaming to this screen is amazing. Looking forward to getting 120Hz working.

Cool!

So an important piece of info might be that Sunshine automatically switches to the virtual display if you disconnect any physical monitor. I didn’t spend much time on it but couldn’t manage to get it to use the virtual display with the physical one still attached.

(I wouldn't try this on a Linux Host) But I believe the shortcut for the Windows Moonlight client was Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1/F12 to switch between the displays.

Instead of this, I happen to setup the Host with Win+P to use the second display only and it works great.

If you want to limit Sunshine to stream the virtual/second display, using the control panel:

Sunshine Configuration > Audio/Video > Output Name

The virtual adapter I just setup with this driver mentioned above, was assigned: '\\.\DISPLAY25' but go ahead and run that 'tools/dxgi-info.exe' to find out.

Also, option.txt using: 3024, 1890, 120 Was about the easiest thing ever.

Any idea how to get HDR to work?

Edit: Re: HDR https://github.com/roshkins/IddSampleDriver/issues/23#issuec...

Great ideas! About the monitor name - that’s the thing, the virtual monitor didn’t seem to have a name when using the tool you mentioned. But maybe that’s because it hadn’t been active at that point. I‘ll try DISPLAY25 :)

HDR: I didn’t look into that, unfortunately. That might then be a case for a programmable HDMI dummy, right?

I wish HN had more content like this. Thanks for the write-up!

Thanks for the kind words ! Really motivates me to write more

Love the blog post. I did something similar with Kindles - into a plug-and-play HDMI monitor. But not as good as you on delay.

https://hackaday.com/2021/01/08/old-kindle-shows-hdmi-video-...

I may need to look again at the parameters you have used for ffpmeg, as it appear to be almost a sorcery to get the correct parameters.

It indeed took several days of trial and errors to get a result I felt comfortable using

You totally hit the mark on being easy to follow, and pleasant to read, I love blog posts like this which don't just dump a solution and then leave it at that but also walk through the process of getting to that point.

Can I suggest adding an RSS feed to your blog? I'd love to follow it, but realistically unless I can add it to a feed reader I'm going to forget it exists!

Thanks for your encouragements. I'm still tweaking the jekyll website, but I'll make sure to add an RSS feed to it

Hey ! I hope you didn't forget my blog already, because I added the RSS feed as you suggested. You can find it at https://pierre-couy.dev/feed.xml

You state multiple times that the Raspberry Pi 3 does not support hardware accelerated h264 decoding, but that's simply not true.

All Pis (except Pico series) support both accelerated encoding and decoding, and have done so since 2012. The Broadcom VideoCore IV in RPi 3 Model B does hw decode at 1080p30.

Yeah you're right. Someone mentioned it on reddit and the issue was indeed not the lack of hardware decoding, but the fact that using it disabled my optimizations regarding latency. You can read more in this thread :https://reddit.com/r/programming/comments/11r9osx/using_a_ra...

Congrats on being on the front page of HN ! Are you the Pierre Couy I met in Centrale Lyon ? We did a project together using D3.js for a pharmaceutical company. Valentin

Yes I am, and I clearly remember the D3.js project. It has been almost 10 years, crazy how time flies!

It's nice meeting you again on HN :)

Fantastic post, great level of detail.

Thank you for writing it and sharing it; I hope you write more technical stuff like this in the future.