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Windows 8 - Way to macro or trigger change in video output?
TheLizardbones
Member CommonPosts: 10,910
in Hardware
I'd like to have my PC output to my living room television, but I want to keep my PC in my den. I can run an HDMI cable to the living room and manually switch video output from my monitor to the television, but is there a way to have this happen automatically, say, when I turn on my wireless controller?
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OK I just did a very quick Google. Bored and got me curious. Why not just a splitter? Or even a splitter switch combo? Am I being stupid or is that kind of what you are looking for? Why can't the signal be on 100% from your pc. Could be a stupid question but screw it.
Nm I guess you are looking for a software solution?
I don't see any reason why you can't plug both the monitor and television into the computer and duplicate the output, meaning compute a signal for one monitor and send the same signal to both.
If you want the television to switch back and forth between being a computer monitor and being a normal television, you can do that at the press of a button with a KVM switch.
Yes you can. You can get an XboxOne and say "Cortana, watch cable". That's probably the easiest. The second way is a bit more complicated. Basically you just use your TV as a display device and run the television signal through the computer. You then have an RF Receiver in your living room to send your controller input back to your PC.
To run cable through a computer you need a TV Input expansion slot that accepts a multi-stream cable card. You get the multi-stream cable card and a decoder from your cable provider.
Hmmm, this is probably the simplest solution, but it has a flaw (for me). The television is a 720p resolution, and the monitor is 1080p-ish though. I've had issues in the past with dual displays with differing resolutions. I like the sharpness of having the resolution matching the display instead of simulating it.
My television already has multiple HDMI ports, so the television switching isn't an issue, and having input to the computer isn't an issue either. A wireless controller and keyboard would reach to the PC, and a PC will handle multiple keyboards/controllers pretty well.
The den is geographically next to the living room, but the path to the den works very similar to walking from place to place in Rift. i.e. Around many obstacles. I didn't want to do that to switch outputs on my PC every time I wanted to play a game. Computers are made to do things on demand, and I thought something like this would sort of exist, but maybe not. Maybe I can write a powershell script or something.
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A software solution would be perfect. Something that recognizes that controller X is turned on, and then switches the output from the 1680x1050 DVI monitor to the 720p HDMI television. If the wired keyboard gets tapped, switch the display back to the DVI 1680x1050 monitor.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
To do something like what you are asking is a bit more difficult of a task since the game itself has its own internal resolution. Manually switching is probably the only real solution. You could possibly make an application that maintains 2 separate ini files and makes one of them the main depending on the display. But that's no simple task.
There is one last solutions "Steam Box". The purpose of Steam OS is to do exactly what you want.
I have been using NirCmd to switch between my headphones and speakers with the press of a keyboard macro. It wouldn't be too hard to write an AutoIt script to launch NirCmd when something like a controller is turned on or a button is pressed on the controller.
http://nircmd.nirsoft.net/
You would probably want to experiment with the setprimarydisplay command.
http://www.autoitscript.com/site/
Probably a good idea, as the only thing he really needs to be doing is switching the primary display from one to the other, which is simple enough and i would imagine, easy to macro. Most GPU's have multiple outputs these days, and handling 2 monitors, or a TV and Monitor, even though their different resolutions, is probably not that taxing, especially as the TV is a much lower resolution than the Monitor.