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 right part of the physical screen, moving windows in and out as needed.
Currently, I use 2 Studio Displays instead of the 1 Wide Screen. When I need to share screens, I press a button on Stream Deck that calls displaypacer to set the resolution on the second display to 1600x900. When done, I press the button again and it toggles the resolution back to 5K. The resolution switching is instantaneous with Apple Silicon/Studio Display making it hassle free.
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 _just_ one physical and that virtual display to the VM, so I can't have my "personal" portrait monitor unoccupied by Windows...
I use `xrandr --setmonitor` to create a fake monitor that only covers part of my screen. And I have some window manager setup to easily move my windows there (with awesomewm).
Yes, Wayland compositors like cage and sway can be nested too.
That said, with both the X nesting approach and the Wayland nesting approach, you'd also need to run the screencasting application itself inside the nested server, not the just the application you want to cast. If the compositor supports a way to create headless outputs (as sway and hyprland do) that is much easier.
It's not exactly the same, but as an alternative to what jauntywundrkind you can use V4L2-Loopback and OBS to create a virtual webcam and use that to share your screen. I find it really handy being able to switch between either just my cam, my desktop or both.
Yeah. On Wlroots or Sway, we can setup virtual displays pretty easily (swaymsg create_output, done). Run wayvnc, and both the other person and yourself connect over vnc or rdp to see what's over there.
I think the problem I have is more so that people want my font sizes to be 3x what I have them. Usually I’m presenting a spreadsheet (financial statements and such) and people ask me to zoom in. Which I can but it breaks the whole thing and throws me off because I can no longer read my document anymore and I’m trying to present it. For that reason, I evangelize that attendees use the Zoom feature on their device if it’s too small.
As I understand the issue it’s not that font is too small on my device, it’s that Teams has a tiny viewport and so it gets shrunk down. Most people aren’t doing full screen. They have a sidebar for chat and such and a top bar of other options. These don’t leave much real estate for my presentation.
Would something like this help my problem or anyone know a better solution?
I often call into meetings where I am also presenting twice. Once on my phone and once from my computer. I use my computer for sharing, audio, video, etc. I use my phone to see what the other people see. Shared screens are always difficult to predict. If you have a 4K screen, it will almost always get downsampled somehow for meetings… it can be too slow otherwise.
In my experience, the problem isn’t that the font is too small on your device, but rather that you’re sharing too much screen. Even if I’m sharing a terminal window (common for me), instead of changing the font, I try to make the window smaller. This has the same effect and is much easier to control. On the viewing device, the video you send it always scaled (either for a different resolution or viewport size), so it helps to limit the size of the screen/window that you’re sharing.
Telling viewers to zoom in if they can’t read anything sounds like you’re blaming them for the problem. If you have a different device connected, you might be in a better position to find a solution on your end.
- Go to System Settings and set the resolution of the virtual display to 1920x1080 (just to be a standard size/resolution and not retina, saves on resources and hassle)
- Still in System Settings, set Accessibility Zoom to render a magnified version on the virtual display:
I ended up buying a bigger monitor for screen share. For most purposes I prefer my setup with multiple 19" monitors running at 1280x1024 but it's a nightmare if someone with a higher desktop wants to share. I have found the bigger monitor nice for games also.
I am presenting SAP t-codes on a daily basis and can relate – especially for presentations I tried to show always only the most important things and use fonts like 2 or 3 times bigger, especially with monospace fonts not so easy to find good readable narrow fonts.
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
I have an Intel MBP, so my first question is will this work on my legacy hardware? And my second question is will this act like a typical external display I connect to my MBP and set it on fire? As far as my experience goes, it's not behaving like an external display unless my CPU is occasionally pegged at 100%, fans are blasting, and my computer becomes intermittently unusable until I disconnect the display.
I used to have an Intel MB, mid 2010.
I had to disconnect the hdmi cable so it can boot, otherwise it would just blast the fan displaying the apple loading animation.
It died on 2022 when i installed an update that asked for a restart and i forgot to disconnect and went on vacation.
RIP Intel MPs. Amazing beasts.
I have always wondered how these virtual desktops work. A cursory looks shows that this is using some undocumented APIs. How do people learn they can create a virtual desktop in this way if the knowledge to do so is hidden/obfuscated?
Does apple allow distribution of an app that use these "private" APIs?
Is anyone aware of what mechanisms are there for achieving something similar in windows?
Very cool. Does it require the "screen recording" indication to be up the entire time whether screen recording is happening or not? I don't see any info in the repo but I recall some previous solutions would effectively appear to be recording all the time.
EDIT: unfortunately it does. But if it's designed for screen sharing, it's probably not a big deal. Unfortunately there's no easy way to mirror on OSX without this, AFAIK. This particular issue is annoying for certain USB-C video adapters that create a virtual screen and mirror it over an arbitrary protocol.
This is an excellent use case that I also often felt the need for.
You can remove all the YT clutter this way, have all the controls and keyboard shortcuts, and extensions like Video Speed Controller still functional while precisely controlling the position and size of the video. Would be great for following long lectures and tutorials.
I use the “maximize video” chrome extension which may work for you. You can click on any video player and it will make that take up the whole browser window size. So then the video size == the browser window size. I use it to panel multiple videos around my screen (mostly for watching multiple NFL games at the same time).
I also use Better Touch Tool which supports keyboard shortcuts for arranging windows, I believe there’s a similar tool for windows. So for example if I want 4 equal sized windows (in each quadrant of the monitor) I can do it easily with keyboard shortcuts.
what a briliant idea, most of my meeting i had to share my 4K screen with laptop pals and most of the time i had to zoom so they can see. now it's solved.
Here is a related project I use to share selected content (usually single windows and my iPad) on a projector while teaching: https://github.com/benjones/presenterMode/
With my 6480 x 3840 (three 4k screens) desktop resolution, in Zoom I just select "Share a portion of screen", and I can resize the area that gets shared to something close to a common screen size.
It's too easy to just use OBS for this, in my opinion. Add the pipewire display capture, add a filter to crop it to a corner, stretch that container to fit the stage, open the window in the corner. Fairly simple.
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 right part of the physical screen, moving windows in and out as needed.
Currently, I use 2 Studio Displays instead of the 1 Wide Screen. When I need to share screens, I press a button on Stream Deck that calls displaypacer to set the resolution on the second display to 1600x900. When done, I press the button again and it toggles the resolution back to 5K. The resolution switching is instantaneous with Apple Silicon/Studio Display making it hassle free.
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